Chapter 177: A Woman Was Drowning Into the Sky

The woman cut another strand from her throat tether.

One of the hooked shadows caught her wing-sail before she could cut the rest.

Those were not natural wings. Two dark frames ran from shoulders to wrists, spreading hide cloth that folded badly in water. A barbed line shot from one frame and buried itself in the woman’s soaked sail. Tension ran through it. She jerked farther from the air and into the blue ceiling sea.

Her bloody hand vanished from the basin.

Jiang stepped into the shallow water.

Aylin caught him above the hips. "Wait."

Under his foot, the chorus leech rolled. Its stolen call broke into bubbles, and the opening widened until the dark water reached Jiang’s breast. Red stone still held the basin on every side. Such depth had no business fitting even his head.

Valea put the flat of her bent blade against the leech without cutting it. "The wound follows this thing."

"Then keep it out of the gutter," Aylin said.

Hest drove one end of his iron bar beneath the ledge lip and braced the other over the nursery runoff. Deeper in the cold chamber, the emperor pair had already taken their chick to shelter. Neither adult looked back for Jiang.

Above the basin, the Bellwyrm opened its torn mouth.

It could have destroyed the little road with one bite. Instead, it watched the drowning woman and made a raw sound through a jaw no longer filled with bells.

On the far side, the woman twisted and cut at the barbed line caught in her sail. A second pursuer descended through the water by hauling on a chain hook. The third stayed above her, between her body and the airless blue.

"You can fit," Aylin said quietly.

Jiang looked from the basin to her face.

"I did not say you should."

Her short blade slipped free. It spun past her reaching hand and disappeared toward the hanging city.

Jiang lowered his head.

Valea pulled plain rope from the coil at Hest’s belt. Aylin made a loose bight and passed it beneath Jiang’s belly, behind his legs and well below the bad shoulder. She tied nothing. One backward step would free him.

"If the leech reaches the nursery channel, I close the wound," she said. "If this catches, leave it. I will not pull you apart to keep you on my side."

Jiang touched the back of her hand with his beak.

Her fingers rested between his shoulders for a breath, careful of the injury, then moved away.

He entered the basin.

His beak passed through water that should have ended against stone. Cold closed over his eyes. Red stone disappeared around his neck, and pressure gripped both sides of his skull before the rest of his body followed.

New feathers held water away from his skin. They did nothing for the shoulder Aylin had pulled or the hip that had struck the anchor throat. Jiang kicked with one good leg, let the other trail through the first stroke, and felt the loose rope sliding after him.

No water fell. There was only depth, drag, and the small circle of the Red Aeries shrinking behind his feet.

`Stormdive` offered him nothing.

Ahead, the woman had stopped trying to swim toward the wrong blue. She bent around the tether still looped at her throat and caught its last strand between the brass wrist hook and her free hand.

One pursuer reeled in the sail line.

Jiang swam past her.

She stared as the penguin ignored her and drove toward the lower edge of the soaked wing cloth. That edge had filled like a net, trapping water and pulling her deeper. Jiang struck it breast-first, rolled, and raked one webbed foot along the fold.

The trapped pocket emptied.

Cloth snapped behind him. The woman stopped sinking for one precious moment.

She used that single moment.

The brass hook sawed through the final throat strand. Black-green fiber recoiled past her cheek and wrapped around the pursuer’s barbed line instead. She did not reach for Jiang. She folded both arms over the ruined sail, kicked toward the darker water below, and followed the broad wake his body had opened.

The air was beneath them.

Human instinct kept trying to carry her upward with the last of the buoyant cloth. Jiang drove down, toward chain silhouettes and trembling city light. He looked back after every second stroke until he saw her copying the angle rather than his exact movement.

The first hooked pursuer abandoned the fouled line.

The second came after them.

Weighted metal hung from the hunter’s boots. With the wing frames folded tight, the weights dragged the body downward much faster than a human could swim. One gloved hand reached for the woman’s ankle.

Jiang turned across the hunter’s path.

His bad leg failed during the turn. Pain tore from hip to belly, and his body yawed sideways. The hunter’s glove missed the woman and closed around the loose rope trailing from Jiang instead.

The line snapped tight.

Far behind him, Aylin hit the Red Aeries water on both knees. Jiang saw her through the shrinking circle, one hand around the rope and the other pinning the clear leech beneath Valea’s blade. Hest’s bar shuddered as black-green vessels reached toward the nursery groove.

Aylin gave one careful pull.

Not hard enough to drag him home. Hard enough to tell him the line was no longer free.

Jiang kicked backward out of the bight.

The rope whipped through the hunter’s fist and vanished into the small bright circle. Valea’s blade came down on the hooked metal that followed it. The cut line fell away before it could widen the wound.

Then Aylin, Valea, Hest, and the cold red ledge narrowed to the size of a coin behind Jiang.

The chorus leech called in his voice one more time.

The road pinched shut around the sound.

Jiang was alone in the ceiling sea with a wounded stranger and three people who wanted her back.

At least they had also lost the rope.

Jiang drove his body downward.

Kicking without help from the bad leg cost him speed. The woman caught up, caught the loose edge of her sail in both hands, and pointed toward a black chain root rising from the city into the ocean. Its upper links vanished into stone-like growths under the water.

Jiang changed course beside her.

She reached the chain first. Her brass wrist hook closed around one link. Gravity pulled the rest of her body out through the underside of the ocean, and she broke into air with a choking gasp.

Jiang followed her through the surface.

His head breached into open sky. Water streamed from his coat toward towers far below. For one awful instant, nothing supported his breast. He bit the chain link and locked his good foot around a rough seam while his bad leg kicked at empty air.

The woman braced a forearm beneath him only after he had his own hold.

They hung under an ocean.

Skykeel spread below them in swinging streets, narrow towers, wyvern perches, and bridges made from chain and bone-white wood. People crossed the open spaces on wing-sails bright as torn banners. Far beneath the lowest roofs, cloud turned around shapes too large to belong to any ordinary bird.

The woman coughed water until she could speak.

She touched her breast. "Kesta."

Then she pointed down at the city. "Skykeel."

The words shared enough old guild sound with the Red Aeries for Jiang to understand them.

Above the water, the hooked hunters reached the chain root.

Below it, a pale living bell opened beneath the nearest tower.

Jiang’s two-voice cry rolled across Skykeel.

Every rider in the air looked up.