Chapter 202: The Seven-Point Captain Came for Kaul’s Throat

Captain Olsa Venn’s burning rod was shorter than Kaul’s forearm.

It lit nothing except what she meant to destroy.

White fire crawled around its blunt end as she crossed the crystallized root. The hunters behind her spread toward Skykeel’s center, boots finding holds in walls that had become floors. Their fin-winged companions swam outside the air bell with wrist lines loose between them.

Two hunters turned toward the nursery passage.

Aylin stepped into their way.

"There are injured young behind those doors."

"That is why the doors close first," Olsa said. Her attention never left the hook in Kaul’s throat. "Nothing leaves the center. Nothing from the center enters the brood rooms."

The chain pulled again.

Crystallized wood groaned beneath every foot. Farther down the south root, Kesta and three residents kept a release rope wrapped around their forearms. They could stop the broken tower from folding inward, or they could keep blood inside Kesta’s palms. Skykeel had ceased offering both.

Kaul’s rider moved between Olsa and the rooted frame.

Her cracked spar remained strapped across her back. She held Kaul’s blade in both hands because one was no longer enough against the changing current.

"You fired before you saw us," she said.

"I saw the road-root."

"You saw a target."

"Those are sometimes the same thing. Move."

The rider set the flat of Kaul’s blade across his throat. The edge faced Olsa, not Kaul.

"He caged my sister’s voice," she said. "I have not forgiven him. I may never manage it. You still do not get to turn everyone bound to this city into ash because killing him feels clean."

Wet breath passed through the copper mouths around them.

Kaul could offer nothing else.

Olsa glanced toward each mouth as it answered him. The three scars beneath her ear tightened. Jiang had taken them for old blade cuts from across the water. Up close, they bent around one another beneath her collar like the paths of roots avoiding stone.

She pulled the white scales away from her neck.

The lowest scar continued into a hollow above her shoulder. Its center had been burned smooth and packed with cloudy glass. When Kaul’s hook flexed, a dark thread rose beneath that glass and struck it from inside.

Olsa pressed the hot rod against her own scar.

The thread shrank. The smell of cooked skin entered the water.

None of her hunters reacted. They had watched her do it before.

"A road entered me there," Olsa said. "I cut it out before it reached the ship behind me. The city it came from kept speaking after everyone inside had drowned."

She resealed her collar.

That was all the history she gave them. It was enough to make Aylin look at the sealed glass, and not enough to make her move.

Jiang climbed from the flooded lip beside her boot. Olsa’s gaze dropped to his burned tongue, then to the black feathers pasted across his wounded breast.

"Your spear missed," he said.

"You bit its guide."

"Then your spear was outwitted by a penguin with a broken beak. I thought a captain should hear that from the penguin."

Aylin’s hand covered the back of his neck. Her grip said she was relieved he could still be unbearable.

Olsa considered him without smiling. "The guide found a living strand. Missing the throat did not make the strand dead."

"Burning the city will."

"Yes. That is the point."

The answer frightened Jiang more than anger would have.

At the nursery passage, one hunter reached the first copper door. Dema and Tovar had braced it from the other side with the bent cradle rib. The hunter could have cut through the hinge. Instead, she knocked the pommel of her white hook against the plate.

"Keep every young body behind this line," she called. "We are closing the outer brace."

Tovar’s voice came through the seam. "You are welcome to close it from your side. Touch the inner bar and I will feed your hand to the cradle."

The hunter looked back at Olsa.

"He may keep the bar," the captain said.

The second hunter swam above the doorway while his fin-winged companion circled the flooded arch. A freed juvenile bell darted from a roof crack, startled by the white armor. The hunter’s blade rose.

His companion struck his wrist with the hard ridge of its brow.

The blade missed the juvenile. The animal followed it instead, turning one slow circle around the small body. Its blue throat fins opened, tasted the water, and closed without darkening.

"No strand," the hunter said.

"Then no blade," Olsa answered.

The juvenile vanished behind Neris’s gray adult bell. Neris leaned her weight against the wall and kept her swollen knee raised.

"Your creatures show better judgment than your weapon," she said.

The hunter rubbed his struck wrist. "They have had longer to learn."

Olsa crossed the final space to Kaul.

His pale bell covered the hook with its broad body. One limb gripped the copper frame. The folded limb dragged across his chest while it tried to spread farther.

Olsa lowered the burning rod until white fire touched the water above its back.

"Move the bell away from him."

Kaul’s hand rose beneath the animal. His fingers trembled against its pale underside. For one uneasy breath, Jiang thought he meant to push it into Olsa’s fire.

Kaul drew it toward his good shoulder instead.

The bell released the frame, slid around his hand, and spread over his throat again.

Olsa shifted the rod away before the animal touched it.

"It is clean," she said. "It cannot remain there."

Kaul’s breath shuddered through the nearest mouth.

He placed his free hand against the bell’s working limb. He did not command it. He waited until the bell adjusted its grip, then lowered his chin and exposed the black-green hook beneath it.

The rider’s blade dropped across the opening.

"Do not mistake that for permission," she told Olsa.

Kaul struck one knuckle against the blade.

The rider looked down at him. Pain crossed her face so openly that Jiang turned his head. There were injuries a witness made worse merely by standing close.

"No," she said. "You do not get to make this simple either."

She kept the blade where it was.

Aylin crouched beside Jiang, leaving her hand at his neck. "The deeper root let us go. The feeder withdrew."

"The hook remained," Olsa said.

"Because removing it may tear the city apart."

"Then we separate the center from the city."

Kesta laughed once from the release rope. There was no humor in it. "With what spare city?"

The south root lurched under another pull. A clear crack ran through the floor beneath Olsa and stopped at Kaul’s frame. Her hunters bent their knees. Their swimming companions tightened the loose wrist lines and held them upright without being asked.

Jiang felt the next change through his feet.

The chain was no longer only pulling.

Heat entered the crystallized tower in small beats. Each pulse traveled from a distant link into a nearer one, white sparks blooming inside the air sheath around the chain. The sparks were moving toward the buried lance head.

Olsa turned so quickly that the edge of her coat struck Kaul’s frame.

"Who moved the strand?"

No one answered. Kaul’s exposed hook had curled around the pale bell’s working limb, not cutting it, only trying to keep contact as the animal shifted.

The movement was enough.

Far across the star-water, the bronze wheel on Olsa’s ship began to shine. Its three sea-wyverns broke their pulling rhythm and threw their finned wings against the bars. Riders leaned close to them, but the wheel continued turning under a force none of the six had chosen.

White fire left the ship.

It ran down the chain one link at a time.

Olsa shoved the burning rod into its sheath and seized the rider’s blade with her bare gauntlet.

"Keep that hook still," she said. "If the fire reaches the spear, your city burns with my people standing on it."

Jiang looked into the narrow current between the links. The route into the weapon had just filled with light.