Chapter 176: The Third Fish Spoke With Jiang’s Voice

The third fish screamed in Jiang’s voice before he could swallow it.

He spat it across the cold ledge.

The fish struck red stone, slapped twice, and gave his two-part emperor cry through a pair of silver gills. Its first note rose thin and sharp. A lower note rolled beneath it in the same rough pulse Jiang felt inside his own breast whenever he called across bad weather.

Aylin had been smiling when she nudged the fish within reach of his beak.

Her smile vanished at once.

Jiang stared at the thing flopping between them. Two earlier rainfish sat warmly in his belly, not nearly enough after the molt. A third had seemed like a modest request from a penguin who had just helped drop a storm bell into a cataract.

He had asked for food, not an impersonator.

Their chick darted out from beneath its mother’s breast.

Jiang lunged first. His bad leg folded on the second step, so he dropped his belly over the fish and caught its tail beneath his good foot. Cold scales beat against the new feathers along his side.

A small beak pecked at the exposed head.

Its mother hooked a beak beneath the chick’s chest and pulled it back. Already injured, the male moved between the little family and Jiang without waiting for anyone to tell him danger had returned.

"Don’t eat it," Aylin said.

Jiang looked up at her.

"That was not a criticism of your judgment five heartbeats ago. It is current advice."

Once more, the fish opened its gills.

Jiang’s own cry rang from the stone under his breast.

Valea came over the broken bridge lip, the familiar bent blade held in one hand. Red grit filled the lines beside her nose. Hest followed more slowly with the long iron tool from Widow’s Needle.

"That fish did not come from a rain basket," Valea said.

Aylin glanced toward the gutter above the ledge. "It washed out after the anchor fell."

"Then it came through the cataract."

A hard twist exposed one gill.

Something clear moved beneath it.

At first Jiang mistook the shape for a loose membrane. Then the membrane clenched around the red inner fan of the gill. It was a narrow, soft-bodied animal no longer than his beak. Black-green vessels branched beneath skin so transparent he could see the fish’s blood pumping through the ring of its mouth.

Each pulse swelled a bladder along its back.

Jiang’s cry spilled from the bladder.

Hest laid his bar crosswise over the gutter leading toward the nursery chambers. "Can it reach the eggs through the runoff?"

"It has gills and a voice it stole in another world," Aylin said. "I don’t want to learn what else it can do beside a nursery."

She tore a strip from the plain inner hem of her coat. There was no silver left in it. She folded the cloth over her palm and reached for the fish.

Jiang tightened his foot.

Clear flesh pushed halfway out of the gill.

A shadow crossed the ledge.

The emperor male drove his mate and chick against the inner wall. Hest swung the iron bar up. Valea turned with her knife held low, and Aylin abandoned the fish to put her body between Jiang and open sky.

The Bellwyrm came over the broken crown of Widow’s Needle without a sound.

It had left blood on the clouds below when it escaped. More blood darkened its bare jaw now. No copper filled its mouth. No black-green braid pinned its teeth together. Its long body struck the outer chain, wrapped once, and brought its head level with the cold ledge.

One yellow eye passed over Aylin.

It passed over Jiang.

The pupil widened when it found the fish.

"It did not come back for us," Aylin said.

That was not as comforting as she seemed to intend.

Without warning, the Bellwyrm lunged.

Jiang shoved off the fish. Aylin caught the feathers above his good hip and dragged him clear as the creature’s lower jaw struck stone. Its teeth closed around the fish but did not crush it. The wounded corner of its mouth trembled, and a bare tooth worked beneath the lifted gill.

The clear parasite released its host.

It dropped onto red stone and moved toward the nursery gutter with a wet, folding crawl.

Hest slammed the length of iron across its path.

The animal flattened. Its transparent body squeezed beneath the metal and left a black-green smear no wider than a feather shaft.

Valea drove her bent knife into the gutter ahead of it. The old blade chipped stone and opened a shallow groove toward the cliff instead of the nursery.

"Give it the wrong water," she said.

Aylin kicked the last rain from a cracked basin into Valea’s groove. Most of it ran over the cliff. A thin skin remained in the stone hollow beside Jiang’s feet.

At once, the parasite turned.

It wanted water badly enough to abandon the nursery path.

Jiang lowered his beak until the cracked tip nearly touched the ledge. The thing gathered itself at the edge of the wet hollow. He waited through one stolen call, then struck behind the swollen voice bladder.

His beak knocked it into the basin.

The Bellwyrm snapped at the same instant.

Its teeth closed on empty air above Jiang’s head. Aylin pulled him backward again, gentler this time and no less quickly. The movement dragged his bad shoulder through old pain until the cold ledge seemed to tilt.

"You are difficult to keep alive when lunch attacks," she said.

Jiang opened his beak at her.

The answer he intended was lost when the basin deepened.

There was not enough water in the hollow to cover Jiang’s foot. Yet the red stone vanished beneath a dark blue depth. Pale shapes moved far below its surface, and light wavered across them from a direction no Red Aeries sun could occupy.

Valea crouched without touching the rim. "That is not our sky."

The Bellwyrm stopped fighting for the parasite.

Its head lowered until the torn mouth hovered above the water. A shiver traveled from its jaw through every coil around the chain.

The animal knew what lay on the other side.

Jiang edged forward despite Aylin’s hand near his back. The basin showed an ocean hanging where a sky should have been. Beneath it, impossibly far down, towers swung from black chains. Winged bodies circled between them. Living bells opened under those bodies like pale throats.

Skykeel, though Jiang did not know its name yet, hung below the water like a city afraid to fall away from its own sea.

The clear parasite rolled in the basin. Its voice bladder swelled once more.

Jiang’s cry crossed the water.

Something struck the far side.

A human hand appeared beneath his reflection.

The palm hit the surface and spread against it, close enough that Jiang saw blood drifting from two torn knuckles. A brass hook was strapped along the woman’s wrist. Dark hair streamed above her face, pulled deeper into the upside-down ocean by a length of soaked wing-sail cloth.

She was not waiting to be rescued.

Her other hand sawed a short blade against a black-green tether looped around her throat. The tether tightened each time the parasite repeated Jiang’s call. She cut through one strand, kicked toward the basin, and lost the distance she had gained when the torn sail filled behind her.

Aylin dropped to one knee. "Can she see us?"

The woman’s eyes opened.

They fixed first on the Bellwyrm’s wounded jaw. Fear changed her face, but she did not stop cutting.

Then she saw Jiang.

For one strange breath, the drowning woman and the injured penguin held their hands and feet against opposite sides of the same shallow water.

Three shadows entered the ocean behind her.

They spread hooked wings where wings should have been useless.