Chapter 95: Beneath The Eye
The song was in her now, and her mind came apart around it.
The bone blade that had been falling toward Rapax’s neck stopped a hand’s breadth from him and hung there, the whole red weight of her arrested at the top of the swing, the eight red eyes drifting off him to look at things the grove did not hold. Rapax had been waiting for this. He had bled himself to the edge and bought it with his hand, and now the instant was his.
Shadow came to the stump of his left wrist. He drew the energy up out of his domain and packed it into the cut, and the black of it clotted the spray where his hand had been, sealing the worst of the bleed long enough to matter. Then he took up his fallen saber in his right hand and turned to open her throat while the song held her still.
A chain came out of the dark and bound her first.
It flew across the grove imbued with shadow the same deep way Rapax’s own sabers were imbued, wrapped the arrested red shape twice over, and drew tight — and Doctor came after it at a run, light on his feet, the warmth on his face turned up to something that did not belong in a grove full of blood.
" What , " Rapax asked , " do you think you are doing ?"
" Sorry, dear. " Doctor did not slow until he was beside the bound thing. " You do not get to kill this one. I need it. Its evolution may be the answer — the thing I have been turning my whole research over to find, this time, finally. I am not letting it die in a glade. "
" You are out of your mind. " The saber stayed where it was, not yet lowered. " How do you mean to carry that back to Caedis. And if you somehow do — you think Grand Cleric Nyx opens the Temple gate to an apex predator on your word? "
Doctor smiled. It was a cheerful smile and it was a terrible one, and the two qualities sat in it without any trouble at all.
" Leave Grand Cleric Nyx to me. " He crouched at the Apostle’s bound side. " And as to how — watch. " A glance up, almost kind. " And do not forget to pick up your hand. Store it in your necro bead, now, while it is fresh. I will put it back when there is time, and the arm will be as good as it was this morning. "
Then he set about his work.
The first thing he did was undo his own protection. His shadow domain sphere, the wide buffer he had stood inside at the perimeter all fight, he drew inward — contracting it margin by margin until it was no sphere at all but a thin black shell laid close over him, a raincoat of shadow fitted to his shoulders and nothing more. Rapax understood the why of it a beat after he saw it. The sphere nullified the choir-song; that was its whole virtue at the edge of the grove. But a thing held captive by the song could not be allowed near a field that switched the song off — let the Apostle into the radius of a full sphere and her mind would clear and the bound creature would become an unbound one. So Doctor shrank his shield to the size of his own skin, and left the song free to keep working in everything beyond it, and the Apostle stayed lost.
Rapax had fought the whole battle with his own sphere wide, because wide was what made it a buffer — it did not stop a blow, it only made each blow arrive a fraction late, a fraction blurred, the margin a grandmaster lived in. Doctor wanted no buffer. Doctor wanted the song.
He took two needles from inside his cheek, the long pale ones, and gathered shadow at their tips until the points burned with the black flame — the same dark fire that had eaten down the Apostle’s severed legs.
" Its carapace can resist that , " Rapax said.
He said it picking up his own hand from the moss where it had fallen, turning it once, putting it into the necro bead with the unbothered economy of a man who had seen worse done to better. Then he took a tier-six pill from the bead, the deep regeneration kind, and put it under his tongue and let it begin its slow work down the lacerations, and he watched Doctor ignore him entirely and proceed.
Because Doctor was not going at the carapace.
The red plate had grown over her *body* — the abdomen, the back, the long limbs, the places Rapax’s broad strikes had been landing. It had not grown over the flesh beneath the eyes. The eight red domes sat in soft unarmored skin, the one part of her the transformation had left bare, because eyes that must see cannot be plated shut. And Doctor was a man who had never in his life attacked the armor of a thing when its softness was right there to be opened instead.
He bent in with surgical care and set a black-flame needle beneath one of the red eyes and drew it sideways.
The skin parted. Not the carapace — the carapace was elsewhere — the bare flesh under the eye, opening smooth and clean along the line the needle drew, no plate to stop it, the soft red tissue laying itself open like the skin of fruit. The Apostle did not writhe. The song held her too far down to feel the edge of the world.
" Pain will bring her up , " Doctor said, conversational, working. " It will break the song’s hold for a moment — she will come back to herself. That is what I want, dear. I want her here for this part. A thing should be awake when it is given its new tenant. Watch. "
So that was the shape of it, and Rapax watched it assemble: the song had bought the capture, the chain held the body, and now Doctor would wake her with the one thing the song could not keep out, which was her own flesh being opened, and have her conscious and bound and his, for whatever the next part was.
With the soft tissue under the eye cut open, Doctor set one needle down on the moss. He swept his free hand across his bracelet, over a bead, and something small came into his palm.
" What is that , " Rapax said.
It was no bigger than a thumb-joint. A compact mass of black, wet-looking shadow-flesh, and from it spread eight fine appendages — eight, thin as hairs at their tips, moving against Doctor’s skin and tasting it, the small body of it pulsing in a slow rhythm. It did not struggle in his hand. It sat there as though it belonged to him, as though it had been waiting.
Rapax knew it. Every shadow practitioner who had survived the Heart knew the shape of it.
" A Dead Caller , " he said, and the words came out flatter than he meant them.
" A young one. " Doctor turned his palm so the small thing rolled toward his fingertips, the eight appendages reaching after the motion. " I imbued it with my own shadow a long time ago, and I tamed it, and now it listens to me. It does what I tell it — which is a thing I can say of almost nothing in this forest, and so I am fond of it, the way you are fond of the one creature that does not want you dead. "
" Dead Callers ride the dead. " Rapax’s eyes went from the thing to the bound, living, breathing Apostle and back. " They thread the spine of a corpse and walk it. That is not a corpse. "
" No. " And there it was — the thing under the warmth, the old worn-thin thing, surfacing for the length of a breath. " It is not. That is the whole of it, dear. That is the question I have spent more years on than you would believe. A Dead Caller takes a *dead* host — threads into a thing past saving and works it from inside, and what it has to work with is residue, memory, reflex, the cold leavings of a life. I have wanted, for a long time, to know whether one could be made to take root in a host that was still *living*. Still generating. Still — " a small motion of the fingers, searching for the word " — *online*. A hand laid on a mind while the mind is still running, instead of after it has stopped. No one has done it. It is held to be impossible, and obscene, and a few other things. " The smile came back, gentle and dreadful. " She is the best host I have ever been handed. She remakes herself faster than the world can break her. If anything alive can carry a Caller and stay itself long enough to be studied, it is this. "
He brought the Dead Caller to the opened flesh beneath the Apostle’s eye.
For a moment it touched the wet edge of the cut, the eight appendages spreading, tasting the warm dark of the wound the way they had tasted his hand. Then it went in. It poured itself into the opening, the small black body folding through the parted skin and under it, the appendages drawing the rest of it after, and it crawled — up, inward, along the soft channels behind the eye, in toward the place the song was at that moment playing the Apostle her own grief — and it disappeared into the head of the bound red thing, and was gone.
Rapax watched the place it had vanished and felt, against the whole of his long discipline, a crawling at the back of his own neck.
" What will it do , " he said. " In there. "
" To begin with, it will take the reins. A hand on her, light, while the rest of her is still hers. " Doctor watched the cut with the particular tenderness of someone setting the last piece of a long machine in its place. " After that — that is what we are here to find out. "
He sat back on his heels in the bloodied moss, and looked at the bound red shape with the song still moving through it and the small dark tenant settling somewhere behind its eyes, and he waited.
" There , " he said softly. " Now we wait for her to wake up. "
