Chapter 13 - The Way Out

The ritual chamber was one level up. Past the tapestries of torture, past the guttered candle stumps, past the stain on the floor where a woman had been strapped to a board and cut while hundreds of candles burned. The room was empty now. The leather restraints hung loose. The blood on the stone had gone tacky and dark.

I told the women to wait in the corridor. Kaniz stayed with them. Her face said she wanted to come and her face said she wasn't going to argue, and both of those happened without a word.

I walked to the edge of the Pit.

The obsidian teeth rimmed the edge. A warm, sweet smell rose from below, nothing like the death upstairs. The darkness had something living in it. I recognized that smell. My body knew it before my brain caught up, and my brain had opinions about what my body was doing with the information.

I'd been tender with Ripple. That's the word. I hate it. It's still the right one. Down there in the dark, when I'd reached out and it had reached back, when it had held me and fed on me and I'd let it, there had been something beyond sex in the contact. It had been lonely for a very long time and I had been kind to it and it had been kind to me back, and kindness in a hellhole like this meant something. I didn't have a word for what Ripple was to me. Whatever it was, I was keeping it.

"Ripple," I said.

Silence held for a moment. Then the air shifted. Warmth rose from below, and a faint pink glow appeared deep down, like something waking from a long way off.

A tentacle surfaced, slow and glistening in the dim light. It reached over the obsidian rim and found my hand and wrapped around my wrist, gentle, the way it had the first time. The way it had when I'd reached out in the dark and it had decided I was worth not eating.

Something moved through the contact. Ripple didn't use words. Impressions came through instead. Warmth. Recognition. The memory of giving myself over to something that wasn't human and it being exactly what I needed. I hadn't told anyone about that part. I wasn't going to. Some things are yours and you keep them.

I sent something back. Gratitude, as clearly as I could manage, which was probably clumsy and loud in whatever language Ripple operated in. Like yelling thank you at something that only speaks in feelings.

The tentacle withdrew. It came back holding something.

It was small and round, iridescent, shifting colors like oil on water. Warm in my palm. Faintly luminescent, a soft pink glow pulsing in time with something I could feel more than see.

An egg.

I stared at it.

Let me walk you through what goes through a nineteen-year-old's head when a tentacle creature he's had sex with hands him a glowing egg. Pure blank white-noise panic hit first. Is this mine? Can tentacle creatures even make eggs with humans? I am not ready to be a father. I am especially not ready to be a father to whatever this hatches into. But it's warm. It's kind of beautiful. I'm holding it like it matters and I don't know when that started.

"Thank you," I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected.

The glow pulsed once, slow, and faded. The tentacle withdrew.

Then something else happened. The pink light didn't fade all the way. It got brighter. Slowly, from the bottom of the pit, something was rising. The whole mass of it, shifting and luminous, pressing upward against the obsidian rim like water finding a crack. A thick ribbon of pink ooze crested the edge, spilled over one of the obsidian teeth, and pooled on the stone floor of the ritual chamber. Then another. Then a third.

Ripple was climbing out.

Malkor's binding must have died with him. Whatever had kept that thing locked in the pit for however many years was gone, and now it was going, too. Slowly, patient, taking its time. The way something moves when it has been still for a very long time and is remembering what it feels like to go somewhere.

I watched the pink mass spread across the stone, flowing around the altar, avoiding the old blood stains like it found them distasteful. A tentacle tip surfaced from the mass and waved in my general direction. More of a see you out there than a goodbye.

The Tome, from under my arm, had gone very still. Then: "That is the warden." Its voice was low, stripped of the usual performance. "The thing Malkor kept in the pit to dispose of his enemies. The thing that has killed every man, woman, and creature thrown to it in eight hundred years of record-keeping." A pause. The eye tracked Ripple's mass as it flowed toward the corridor. "And it gave you an EGG."

The eye swiveled up to look at me. Then down at the egg. Then back at me.

"I need to know," it said, "and I say this with the full weight of eight centuries of meticulous documentation behind me: what EXACTLY did you do down there?"

"I was kind to it."

"You were KIND to it." The Tome processed this for a moment. "You were kind to the ancient abyssal warden that has dissolved three hundred and forty-seven people, and it gave you a REPRODUCTIVE TOKEN." The brass fittings caught what little light was left. "I am going to need a full account. In order. With detail. That egg is going in the records."

I had the feeling, standing in a ritual chamber watching a tentacle creature ooze its way to freedom while a sentient grimoire demanded the details of my sex life, that this wasn't the last I'd see of either of them.

The egg was the size of a pitcher. I held it against my chest with one hand, warm through the dead guard's tunic, warm and faintly pulsing. I had run out of arms.

I walked back to the corridor. Kaniz was standing at the entrance to the ritual chamber, not where I'd left her. She'd moved. She was watching the pink mass flow across the floor of the chamber behind me, and her face was doing something I hadn't seen on it before. Her face was all calculation. The face of someone who'd just learned something important about the man she'd attached herself to and was running the numbers.

"That's the thing from the pit," she said. "The one they fed people to."

"Yes."

She looked at Ripple. She looked at me. Her eyes went to the egg in my arms.

"Is that yours?" she said.

"What? No."

"It came from the pit."

"It came from the creature in the pit."

"The creature you..." She trailed off and looked at the egg again. Then at me. Her eyebrows shot up and stayed there.

"It's a guy," I said. "I'm fairly sure it's a guy. I guarantee it's a guy."

"Then where did the egg come from?"

"I don't know! It handed it to me! It was a gift! A parting gift! Don't look at me like that."

She was looking at me like that. The Tome was also looking at me like that, from under my arm, with the single most entertained eye I had ever seen on a book.

"REPRODUCTIVE TOKEN," the Tome said again, helpfully.

"Shut up."

"I will not. This is the most significant biological event I have witnessed in four centuries. The warden's reproductive cycle has never been documented. You may be carrying the ONLY"

"I said shut up."

"Hold this," I said to Kaniz, shoving the egg at her.

She took it. Looked at it. Held it up to the torchlight. The glow pulsed against her fingers. She tilted it left, then right, then squinted at it.

Then something moved across her face and her expression went careful.

"Was this inside you?" she said.

"What? No!"

"It came from the pit creature. The one you..." She held the egg at arm's length. "Was this inside you?"

"It was NOT inside me. What the fuck. No. It handed it to me. With a tentacle. From outside my body. At no point was it inside my body."

She looked at the egg. She looked at me. She looked at the egg again. Then she dropped it.

It hit the stone floor and bounced once and rolled to a stop against the wall, glowing cheerfully. The thing didn't crack, chip, or scuff. Whatever Ripple made its eggs out of, it was built to last.

"Pick that up," I said.

"You pick it up."

"I have a grimoire under one arm and a blade on my belt and seventeen women to walk down a mountain. You're carrying the egg."

"I don't want to carry the egg."

"Aren't you my slave or something?"

She looked at me. I looked at her. We both processed what I'd just said.

"I guess," she said. She walked to the wall, picked up the egg, and held it against her chest with the resigned expression of someone who'd made a series of very bad decisions and knew it. The glow pulsed once against her collarbone.

"It's warm," she said, after a moment.

"Yeah."

She adjusted her grip. Held it a little closer. The corner of her mouth moved, just barely, and she looked down at it like she was annoyed that it was growing on her.

"It's not mine," I said.

"Of course not, master." She held it tighter.

I had a grimoire under one arm and a blade on my belt and seventeen women to walk down a mountain. Kaniz had the egg. I was delegating. Ashara would have been proud. Also I was mildly terrified of it and standing next to it was not helping.

The real problem, and I was aware of this even as I walked out of the ritual chamber, was that I had come here to kill a warlock. I'd done that. I was supposed to walk out with a grimoire and rescued women and go home. Instead I was walking out with a talking book, a smokeshow in a collar who'd decided I was her new master, and an egg from a tentacle creature I'd fucked in a pit. None of this had been in the contract.

I lived in one room above an inn. The bed was narrow, the nightstand was small, and the only storage was a trunk that held my spare trousers and a knife I'd stolen from Ashara. There wasn't room in that trunk for a sentient grimoire. There wasn't room in that bed for me and Kaniz. There was definitely not room for any of it plus Felix, who had a standing invitation and a key, and whatever this egg was going to hatch into.

I had walked in here as a rogue on a job. I was walking out as a guy with mouths to feed. The Guild orientation did not cover this.

*

We went up. Out of the ritual chamber, past the chapel where I'd killed five acolytes what felt like weeks ago, through the main hall with the hanging cages and the desiccated bodies swaying in their rusted iron. Empty eye sockets tracking nothing. The gate was ahead, open, the way I'd come in a lifetime ago.

Mountain air hit like a wall of cold. Clean. Pine and rock and the emptiness of high altitude at night. Half the women started crying. The blonde girl sat down on the ground outside the gate and put her face in her hands and shook.

I let them have it. There was nothing else to give them.

Kaniz appeared beside me. Half a step back and to one side, a dead guard's cloak over her shoulders that she'd picked up somewhere between the Tome chamber and the exit. I hadn't seen her take it. Eight months in this fortress had taught her to collect things quietly.

"Oakhaven," I said to the older woman. "How far?"

"Half a day. Down the mountain, through the valley." She looked at the women. At the state of them. "Longer, maybe."

"Then we walk."

The group formed up, slow and unsteady. Seventeen women in rags, barefoot most of them, some leaning on each other to stay upright. An older woman with a scabbed gash who hadn't stopped moving since I'd opened the door. A blonde girl from Oakhaven who'd stopped crying and started walking. Kaniz in a stolen cloak, half a step behind me, ankle cuffs making their small sound on the rocky ground, a glowing egg cradled against her chest like she'd been carrying it her whole life. A spent grimoire under my arm, eye barely open, brass fittings dull.

And me. A rogue in a dead man's clothes with a ritual blade on his belt and blood on his hands and a pull in his chest he hadn't asked for and couldn't explain.

We walked out into the dark.

Somewhere behind us, past the gate, in the trees where the moonlight didn't reach, something moved. Pink. Brief. Patient.

I didn't look back.

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