The Twelfth Floor

Three weeks of Shallow floors had carried Corwen from Level 14 to Level 17, and the window showed it when he called it up in the lift-cage on Friday morning, with the twelfth floor's cold already breathing up the shaft.

Three levels in three weeks was quick for a grade-B talent. Maud had noticed, and had said nothing, which was how Maud noticed things. Pell had noticed too and had said a great deal.

"Seventeen," he said now, hanging off the cage bars with his spear across his back. "I'm sixteen and I started a year before you. What are you eating?"

"Rockhounds."

"I eat rockhounds."

"Eat them faster."

Tamsin, on Corwen's other side, checked the strap of her shield for the fourth time. The Deep floors began at eleven. None of the three of them had been below ten in this life. Corwen had been below thirty in the other one, and he could feel the difference in the air already, the way the lantern light seemed to stop a little short of the walls.

The Lantern Company came out of the cage on the eleventh floor in a column, Maud at the front with her pole-lantern held high, six Blades and four shields and two porters with the hide-frames, and they went down the long stair to the twelfth. The stair was crown-cut, square and even, and the twelfth floor beyond it was a gallery of dripping pillars where the Hollow Wyrms nested in the dark between.

A Hollow Wyrm was eight yards of grey, legless, eyeless beast, so called because its ribs were hollow and rang like a drum when you struck them. It hunted by sound. It was Deep-floor through and through, a Level 20 beast by the Guild's reckoning, and a party of Journeymen could kill one if they did it carefully and all together. Its hide was worth two gold crowns. Its fangs, four of them, each as long as a forearm and as hard as the steel in Greyhallow, were worth more, because a Hollow Wyrm fang could be ground into a whetstone that would hold an edge for a year.

"Shields front," Maud said quietly. "Blades on the flanks. Nobody speaks. Ashe, you're on the left with Pell. Tamsin, centre shield. We find one wyrm, we kill one wyrm, we go home."

They found one in the fourth pillar-row, coiled in a hollow of the floor like a rope left by a giant, and for nearly a minute it went the way it was meant to go. The shields closed. The Blades came in on the flanks. Corwen put his borrowed sword into the soft seam behind the wyrm's jaw, which was the place he had learned to find in the first life and had no business knowing in this one, and the wyrm reared and rang like a bell and began to die.

Then the second wyrm came out of the dark on the left.

There should not have been a second wyrm. Hollow Wyrms nested alone. Corwen had time to think that, and to think that something on the Deep floors was wrong in a way that was not in his memory, and then eight yards of grey beast came down the left flank with its mouth open and Pell Rook was in front of it.

Pell got his spear up. The spear went into the wyrm's throat and the wyrm did not care. It took Pell at the waist and lifted him and shook him, and Corwen heard the boy's spine go, a clean dry sound that he would hear for the rest of his life, in this life or any other.

"Pell!" Tamsin screamed, and broke the shield line.

Corwen was already moving. He went under the wyrm's jaw, not over it, because the seam was under, and he put the borrowed sword in to the hilt and dragged it sideways with both hands and all forty-six points of his strength behind it. The wyrm's hollow ribs rang once, high and cracked. It dropped Pell. It turned its blind head toward the sound of Corwen's breathing, and Maud Ferris's pole-lantern came down across its skull like a falling tree, and it died.

The window opened in front of his eyes before the beast had finished falling.

He closed it without reading the rest. Tamsin was on her knees in the wet with her brother's head in her lap. Pell's eyes were open. He was trying to say something, and what came out was blood and then nothing, and then his eyes were still open and there was nobody behind them.

In the first life Pell Rook had lived. He had gone south after the Calamity, and Corwen had always, in a vague way, assumed he was alive somewhere, farming or fishing or drinking. He had never once imagined Pell on the twelfth floor in the spring of 1160, because in the first life Corwen had not been on this delve, and the Company had come back with one wyrm's hide and no dead.

"I did this," he said, to nobody.

Maud heard it. She looked at him over the lantern-pole, her square face grey in its light, and said, "You killed a second wyrm with a borrowed sword, Ashe. The dark did this. Get his legs."

They carried Pell Rook up the crown-cut stair between them, Corwen and Tamsin, and the porters came behind with two hides on the frames instead of one. On the eleventh floor landing, where the lift-cage waited, a man was standing against the wall with a hooded lantern, and he was not Lantern Company and not any company Corwen knew. He was tall and thin and wore a delver's leathers with no badge at all, and he looked at the body and at the hides and at Corwen, and he said, in a voice that carried no further than it needed to,

"Two wyrms on twelve. It is early. The Calamity should not be waking them yet."

Corwen stopped so suddenly that Tamsin stumbled.

Nobody in Sallow had said that word. Nobody in Vael had said it. The delvers would not give the autumn of 1168 a name until the winter after it, and the name they gave it was the Calamity, and this man with no badge had just said it on the eleventh floor landing eight years early as if it were the name of a tavern.

"What did you say?" Corwen said.

The stranger looked at him and something moved behind his eyes, a recognition, or a measuring. "I said the dark is restless," he said. "Mind your dead, Blade." And he stepped into the shadow beside the stair and was not there.

"Ashe," Tamsin said. Her voice had no tears in it at all. That was worse. "Ashe, pick him up."

He picked Pell up.

On the first floor, under the Warden's lamps, they laid the boy on the Guild's cart and Tamsin sat down beside him and took his hand, and Corwen went back to the hide-frame and found the second wyrm's head where the porters had left it. He cut the longest fang out of the upper jaw with his belt-knife. It took a long time. The window opened once, quietly, while he worked, and he let it.

He put the fang in his belt. He did not look at the window again. He went and sat down on the other side of the cart from Tamsin, and the three of them, two living and one dead, waited together for Maud to finish counting the Company back up into the light.