I Only Summon Villainesses

Death Sense opened on its own.

I hadn’t asked it to. It had done that exactly once before, in the dark above the tide, when something crossed into range that was too big for me to have a say in whether I noticed it, and it did it again now, and I stopped walking so fast that Ilse walked into my back.

”What.”

’...’

”Cade.”

’Ilse.’

’Ilse, there are five.’

Five lives. Not near. That was the part my head couldn’t hold. They were a long way off and they filled me anyway, five enormous slow weights strung out in a line across the floor of the layer, each one bending everything around it the way a stone bends cloth, and Death Sense gave me their distance and their heading and then quietly declined to give me their size, the way it had flinched off the serpent, because there are numbers a sense won’t say out loud.

They weren’t hunting. That was the strangest part. There was no killing intent in any of the five. Nothing in them wanted anything from me at all, and a thing that doesn’t want anything is a stranger to me in a way even the Archmage wasn’t.

They were just walking.

”Something’s coming,” I said. ”Five somethings. West to east, crossing us.”

Ilse didn’t ask how I knew. She’d stopped asking around the third day.

”How far.”

”Far. It doesn’t matter how far—”

The ground answered before I finished.

It came up through my boots first, a single deep knock, like a door closing somewhere under the world. Then the grit on the shelf began to hop. Then the whole slope leaned, and a section of the wall above us shed itself in one piece, and the sound arrived last of all, a long low rolling boom with no edge to it anywhere.

’Ah, damn...’

’...That was a footstep.’

’That was one footstep.’

”Down,” Ilse said. ”Now. Off the shelf.”

We went off the shelf.

I would like to describe what came through, and I can’t do it properly, because I never saw one whole. What I saw was legs. Or something that did the work legs do, columns of grey-black moving through the far dark, so tall that the tops of them went up past where my eyes stopped working and kept going into the black vault of the layer, and they came down slowly, one after another, patient as a clock.

Nothing about it was hurried. Nothing about it was aimed. Five of them, spread out over a mile of dead world, walking east, and every time a foot came down the layer broke a little more.

An entire ridge went over while I watched. Not crumbled. Went over, whole, the way a man goes over, and lay there.

’Brunhilde.’

She came back thin and slow, from a long way inside.

’...I feel it.’

’What are they.’

’I do not know. Cade, I have said that too often this week and I dislike it very much.’ A pause, and the effort it cost her to hold the thread was in the pause. ’They are not fighting. Do not treat them as a fight. You cannot fight the weather.’

’Then what do I treat them as?’

’A season,’ she said. ’You know what I do to a field. Now imagine a thing that does it without noticing you are on it.’

And that was when Death Sense filled up.

Not with the five. With everything else.

Because it turns out that when the world ends in a particular direction, everything living gets the memo at the same time, and I stood on a broken slope in the dark and felt six hundred lives come off the floor of that layer at once and start moving.

Toward us.

’...Oh no.’

’Oh no. Ilse. Ilse, run.’

”Which way?”

’Any way that’s a hole!’

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about a place like this. The Precipice is full of things that would kill you. It is also full of things that wouldn’t, that have never once thought about you, that have spent their entire blind existence eating something else in a crack in a rock. And it does not matter, because when five walking mountains come through, the polite ones and the ugly ones all want exactly the same thing.

A hole. Deep, and narrow, and already there, and there are never enough of them.

We found ours because Ilse counted.

She’d been counting since the shelf, and when the slope came apart she knew, without looking, that there’d been a fissure in the rock face forty paces back and eleven paces up, and she turned and went for it with the belt yanking me after her like a dog.

It was a crack in the wall about as wide as my shoulders, running back into the stone further than the green glow reached.

We were nine paces from it when the first of them got there.

It came up the slope in a scrabbling rush, pale and low and many-legged, the size of a pony and blind as a stone, and it did not slow down at us and it did not roar and it did not do a single one of the things a monster does. It just wanted in. There was no malice in it anywhere. Death Sense read it and gave me nothing back but a small terrified life running from a bigger noise, and I killed it anyway.

Chains of Agony came out of me before I’d decided, three lengths, and I put them through it and hauled and felt the well drop hard behind my ribs, and the thing screamed once and came apart on the rock, and I stood in front of a crack in a wall with someone else’s blood on my forearm and no way to pretend it had been self-defence.

’That wasn’t hunting me.’

Cade.

’It wasn’t even looking at me, Wren.’

Later. Do it later. There are more.

There were more.

They came up out of the dark in a mob, four, then nine, then too many to count, blind things and horned things and one enormous soft thing that moved like a hand, all of them scrambling over each other for a slot in the rock that fit exactly two, and the ground kept knocking, and somewhere out west another ridge went down.

So that was the battle. Not the titans. The titans never knew we existed. The battle was every desperate blind thing in a dead world and us, at the mouth of a crack, fighting over who got to not die.

I have been in a lot of fights. That was the worst one. Not the hardest. The worst.

”Left!” Ilse called.

I didn’t look left. Looking is slow. I put Wren where the thing was going to be and she went in under a jaw and I twisted and pulled her out and the next one was already coming over the top of the body.

And then Ilse grew.

I’d seen it once, at the colony, and knowing it was coming did nothing at all. She dropped her shoulders and rolled them and came up half a head taller and heavier through the arms, the horns pushing dark and blunt up through her hairline, and she set herself square in the mouth of that fissure like a door in a frame and started putting things down with her bare hand when the sword was too slow.

”Get in,” she said.

”Not before—”

”Get in. You are the one with the flame. I cannot hold this from behind you.”

’...Fair.’

I got in. I hated it. I put my back to the stone two feet inside the crack with the green glow on the wet rock and Wren up, and I burned the well down to a socket holding the line she couldn’t.

Purifying Flame off my knuckles, white and thin, and I want it on the record that I used the smallest fire I could make. Every time I let it grow I felt the level drop and I heard Brunhilde’s cost in it, the number I’d been quietly carrying since the field, and I kept it low and I kept it mean and I burned the front of that hole clean about eleven times.

Feather Step, twice, to get across the mouth when something got past her shoulder. Chains, once more, and the well went to mud.

’Brunhilde. How much do I have left.’

She didn’t answer straight away, and when she did the thread had gone very faint.

’Cade. Listen. I am in the Nave.’

’I know where you are.’

’You do not. Every hour I sit here, I get cheaper.’ Fainter still. ’The Sanctum counts it. The longer I wait, the less it costs to bring me out. So stop spending the well trying to be gallant, and let me get cheap. That is all you have to do. Survive, and be poor, and I will come down in price.’

’That’s the least romantic thing anyone’s ever—’

’You are welcome. I cannot hold this. Talk to me when it is quiet.’

Gone.

I don’t know how long the mouth of that crack held. Long enough that my arms stopped reporting to me. Long enough that the noise of the world outside changed from scrambling to knocking to one enormous grinding roll, close, then closer, then directly overhead.

The fifth one came down on our stretch of the layer.

I felt the foot land through the whole thickness of the rock. The crack we were in shifted — not broke, shifted, the two walls of it moving past each other by about a hand’s breadth with a sound like a mountain clearing its throat, and a slab came down across the mouth and shut us in with maybe nine inches of gap at the bottom.

Everything outside stopped.

Not stopped. Was stopped. There’s a difference, and I heard the difference, and I am not going to write down what it sounded like.

Ilse and I sat in the dark inside a sealed crack in the rock with our shoulders touching and our breath going, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

The horns went back down. I felt her shrink beside me.

”How many did we—” she started.

”Don’t.”

”They were running.”

”I know.”

”They were running from the same thing we were running from,” Ilse said, ”and we killed forty of them for a hole in a wall.”

’...Yeah.’

’We did.’

I sat with that, in the dark, with the taste of stone dust in my mouth and my well down to nothing and a woman beside me who was too honest to let either of us off.

”That’s the Precipice,” I said finally. ”Isn’t it. That’s the actual thing. It’s not the monsters. It’s that down here everybody wants the same hole.”

Ilse said nothing for a while.

Then, dry as anything: ”You will get used to it.”

”That’s the part I’m worried about.”

We sat.

And after a long while, through the nine-inch gap at the bottom of the slab, in a layer that had just been walked flat by five things that never once knew we existed, something on the other side very quietly moved.

’...Ah, what now.’