THE FIRST DESCENT

The Gorge began as a line on the horizon, and ended as a wound.

I came to its rim at first light, three days later, with Hawk's pack on my back and his old short-barrel at my hip. The land had been climbing for miles in long dry steps. Then it simply stopped. The red earth fell away in a sheer cliff on the other side of a lip of crumbling rock, and below it was nothing: a gulf a mile wide and some twelve hundred feet deep, its walls banded in rust and ocher and bone, its floor a smear of dark mist.

The wind came up out of it and hit me in the face. It smelled of hot stone, and iron, and something sweet and rotten underneath.

Far down, a thin shrill chittering echoed from wall to wall. Something with a great many legs was awake.

I knelt, took the map from my coat, and read it a last time.

First tier: the scrub. Beasts of the Iron rank. Rattlehorn Drake, stone-scorpion, hook-wasp. Meat for the unwary.

Second tier: the stairs. Bronze. The Stalkers.

Third tier: the Hollowback's door.

I rolled the map and put it away. The Emberheart, in my chest, was quiet but alert, a large animal lying in tall grass. I touched my breastbone once through the coat.

"We are going down," I told it. "Be useful."

I tied the rope to an iron stake that Hawk's grandfather had driven into the rock sixty years before, and went over the edge.

…

I will say this for the first tier: it taught me not to be proud.

The descent was a hundred and fifty feet of a goat path scraped into the cliff, and it ended in a long red valley choked with thornbrush and fallen boulders, laced with dry gullies, shimmering in a haze that rose from the sunbaked stone. Heat beat up from below. Heat beat down from above. Insects the size of my thumb whirred through it, pale-winged and glittering, and when I raised a hand to brush one off my collar I found it had left a bead of blood.

Hook-wasp, I thought. Eat the stingers, wear the wings. The lore came back in the dry, impersonal voice of a textbook. I hooked my scarf over my nose and mouth and moved on.

The Rattlehorn Drakes found me at noon.

I heard them first. A dry clicking, like a handful of stones being shaken in a gourd, rolling down the valley from several directions at once. Then I saw the first, lifting its head over a rock thirty yards ahead: a long, ugly, rust-colored lizard the size of a calf, with a frill of hollow horns along its spine that rattled when it moved. Its eyes were yellow. Its tongue was black. It watched me with the deep calm stupidity of an animal that has never lost a fight.

Then there were six.

They spread, fanning around me in the way I knew they would, because it was in every hunter's almanac on the Frontier. Pack hunters. They flushed their prey into a pocket and then charged together. Their horns, rattling, made a deafening din, designed to rattle the nerve. The best men I knew had died because they had run.

I did not run.

I stood still, very still, with my back to a boulder and my hand resting on the pistol, and I counted.

They lead with the largest. The alpha will rear and roar to demoralize. When it roars its throat opens, and the scales at the base of the neck lift for a second. That's the gap.

It was information I had paid for with a friend's life, in the previous existence, on a hunting trip with the Fairchild cousins. I'd watched a Drake open a boy's stomach while his friends fumbled. I had not forgotten.

The alpha reared.

It was magnificent, in a way: a ten-foot fan of tawny scale, the great frill lifting, the jaws gaping wide to bellow. And in that instant, in the moment it opened its throat, I fired.

The pistol cracked like a whip. The slug was an ordinary lead-and-ley-fire round, nothing special; I had no money for special. It went in under the chin, through the exposed gap, and out the back of the skull. The alpha went over sideways like a felled tree and lay twitching in the dust.

The five others stopped.

Not for long. A moment. The pack had lost its head and did not know what to do. Their horns went quiet. In the silence I heard my own breath.

Then they came anyway, all five at once.

…

I had two shots left. I did not use them.

I had spent the previous night at Hawk's bench, working with a sack of ley-powder, a spool of copper thread, and a handful of rusted bolts, and I had made, with my own cold hands, six small grenades of the sort that every bandit on the Frontier knew how to build. They were not clever. They were ugly. They were exactly the kind of tool a person makes when she has nothing else.

I had set them in the throat of the valley an hour earlier.

The Drakes came down the gully at a flat run, shoulder to shoulder, funneled by the narrowness of the pass. They hit the first thread as one. I saw the copper wire snap taut and glint. Then the world went white and hot.

The explosion was not loud, but it was large. Fire came out of the gully mouth in a flat orange sheet, scattering rock and smoke and chunks of lizard. A second blast followed, and a third. I turned my face into the boulder and clapped my hands over my ears. Fragments pattered down on my coat like hail.

When I looked up the gully was a ruin. Two of the Drakes lay dead. The others were thrashing, screaming, scorched. I took a deep breath and stepped out, reloading as I went, and finished them one by one with the knife.

It took a while. I was not good at it. The first one took three tries.

When it was over I sat down on the rock with my hands hanging between my knees and my whole body shaking, and I looked at the blood on my sleeves.

In the last life, I could not look at blood. I fainted at it. I'd once thrown up on the stairs when a kitchen maid cut her thumb.

I turned my hands over in the light. They were red to the wrist.

It's only the cost, I thought. It was an odd thought, and rather clear. Not horror, and not satisfaction. It was how a woman feels who has paid a bill. Blood was a currency, like silver. It bought what it bought. One accepted the price or one went without.

I wiped my hands on the dust and got up.

…

The Mana Crystals came out of the Drakes' skulls: small, wet, translucent things, the size of grapes, pale amber. They glowed faintly in my palm. The old hunters sold them in town for three dollars apiece. The old hunters, being old, had never swallowed one.

I put the first on my tongue.

It tasted like a coin and a thunderstorm. It was cold and then it was not, and it slid down my throat like a shard of ice and burst somewhere under my ribs, and every nerve in my body lit up at once. I doubled over. I clamped my teeth on a scream and thrust my fist in my mouth.

It lasted a long minute. When it faded I knelt in the dust, gasping, soaked in sweat, and felt the heat of it spreading down my limbs, into my fingers, into the soles of my feet. The Iron Sigil on my wrist throbbed in time with my pulse, a small hard fire.

One.

I took the second crystal. The pain was the same, and worse, because I knew it. The third was bearable. By the fifth I could do it without a sound.

By the sixth I understood that the pain was not a price I paid to get stronger. The pain was the strengthening. It was the body rebuilding itself, one bone, one nerve at a time. Every ache a brick laid. I could bear a great deal of that.

When the last was gone I lay on my back on the hot stone for an hour with my eyes shut and my arms flung out, drinking water in small sips, and listened to the Emberheart beat. It was steadier now. It had not asked for any of the crystals. But I thought it had liked them.

…

That night I made camp in a cleft of rock, under an overhang that Hawk's grandfather had marked with a cross. I built no fire. I ate cold bread and jerky. I watched the stars come out, enormous, white, undimmed by any city, the Frontier sky I had missed more than I'd known.

The Gorge sounded different at night. The chittering died. The wind dropped. Into the quiet came a low continuous murmur, like a distant crowd, rising and falling, rising and falling, as though the walls themselves were breathing. I lay in my bedroll with the pistol under my hand and listened.

Somewhere in it, very faint, I thought I heard a voice. Saying nothing. Saying nothing at all in a voice I almost knew.

I did not sleep well.

Some hours before dawn, I woke with the particular alertness of an animal being watched.

I lay quite still. I did not reach for the pistol. I turned my head by degrees.

The overhang was a low black shape against the stars. The cliff above it climbed in tiers toward the rim, slabs and ledges silvered by a thin moon, and on one of those ledges, thirty feet above me, motionless, something was looking down.

Two eyes.

They were small, and round, and a pale burning silver, like twin coins held to a flame. They did not blink. They did not move. They held on me with the flat, patient interest of a predator that has not yet decided whether I am a meal or a curiosity.

I kept my hand where it was.

A cat, said the part of me that took inventory. A big one. No. Not a cat.

The eyes held a long time.

Then, soundlessly, they closed. When they opened again the ledge was empty.