THE WINGED CAT

The Hollowback did not charge. That was the first thing that told me how dangerous it was.

A lesser beast would have rushed. This one stood in the throat of the passage with its huge head lowered, its flanks working like a bellows, and it looked at me. It took in the knife. It took in the pistol on my hip. It took in the way I had positioned myself, a step to the left of the light, with a sheer wall at my back and the long red shelf open before me. Then, with a deliberation I could only call tactical, it turned its flank toward me, so that the open cavity down its spine gleamed in the last of the sun, and it began to hum.

The crystals sang. It was a low, trembling, harmonic note, rising from the hollow of its back, and every hair on my arms stood up. A dozen crystals lit at once, red and gold, as bright as a lamp.

It's charging a shot.

I rolled.

The Hollowback's back-crystals fired in a volley, a spray of narrow red bolts that hissed through the air where my head had been and gouged glowing furrows in the cliff behind me. Stone burst. Sparks showered. I came up on one knee and fired twice with the pistol. The slugs smacked into its shoulder plate and ricocheted off in a puff of dust.

It turned its head and regarded me with something almost like contempt.

Then it charged.

…

I will not describe all of what followed. A fight is a muddle. It is a series of small, hot, panicked decisions made in the space between heartbeats, and most of them are wrong.

I remember the ground shaking. I remember the beast's shoulder missing me by a hand's breadth and tearing a slab of rock off the wall. I remember rolling under a hook-clawed foreleg and feeling the hot gust of its breath. I remember a swipe that caught me across the left shoulder and flung me ten feet through the air, and the impact of the stone against my back, and a white sound like a bell in my skull. I remember lying there for a moment, unable to think of anything, while the Hollowback turned with a slow and terrible patience and began to walk toward me.

My shoulder was open. I could feel it, hot and wet, a long gash from collarbone to blade. The Bronze mark flared on my wrist, and somewhere in my chest the Emberheart answered, beating hard, almost angry.

Get up.

I got up.

I was bleeding. I was slow. I was out of tricks, almost. But I had one thing the Hollowback did not: I had seen what it was made of.

I'd been staring at its back since the first volley. At the great open channel down its spine, and the crystals set in it, row on row, red and gold, glittering. And I had watched the way they lit up in turn when it fired. A lattice. A pattern. Each crystal was linked to the next by a thin, glowing thread of magic. Every beast in the Gorge carried a little of the stuff, a fine web of Mana running through its flesh, but the Hollowback carried it outside. Its spine was not an organ. It was an engine, a long row of coupled cells, charged and discharged in sequence.

A structure.

I almost laughed.

Of course.

I backed away. I let it come after me, stalking, deliberate, across the red shelf toward the edge, where the rock fell away in a spill of loose shale. It followed. It was smart, but it was also proud. It had not lost a fight in forty years, and it had never met anything that wanted it to follow.

I stopped at the lip. I turned, with my back to the drop and the knife held low, and let it see my face.

It lunged.

I stepped aside.

I will always remember that: the huge weight rushing past me, the stink of its breath, the little cold click as the shale began to give way under its feet. It tried to stop. It could not. Its great claws scrabbled for purchase in the loose scree. For one frozen instant it hung half over the edge, with its head thrown back and its spine toward me, every crystal glowing.

I flung my left hand out, palm flat, and called the Cinder.

It came up my arm like a flood. It was not a thread this time. It was a torrent, a ribbon of dull red heat that poured from the Bronze mark and across the space between us in a single bright line and struck the Hollowback's spine at the tip of the tail. I felt it go in. I felt it run, quick and merciless, along the lattice of linked crystals from stone to stone, and each stone, as it caught, screamed. A high thin shriek. They were not made to be burned, those jewels. They were made to be tuned.

Then the first one burst.

Then the next, and the next, popping off down the line in a chain, each one lighting the one after, until the whole row of crystals went up in a long roaring chain of red-gold detonations that tore the Hollowback's back apart from the inside.

The sound was beyond hearing. It blew me flat. I lay on the stone with my ears ringing and watched the beast, a thousand pounds of meat and plate, lurch out into empty air and fall, trailing smoke and blood and burning crystal, down and down into the mist.

I heard it hit. It took a long time.

…

"Well," I said aloud, to nobody, after a minute. My voice sounded very strange. "That was inefficient."

I wanted to lie there. I did not. I got my good arm under me and sat up, and was promptly sick, quietly and thoroughly, into the dust. Then I tore a strip off my shirt, bound the shoulder with a hand that wouldn't stop trembling, and set about taking stock.

The ledge was a wreck. A half-dozen red craters pocked the rock where the bolts had landed. There was blood on everything. And something was crying.

It was a thin sound, very high, like a kitten caught in a gate. It came from the left, from the base of the cliff, somewhere near a heap of fallen stones. I stood up with the pistol in my hand and my pulse in my teeth and went to look.

In the lee of a boulder, half buried under rubble, a cat was trying to crawl out.

It was not a cat.

It was small, the size of a house cat, but with a build that no house cat has ever had: thick-pawed and long in the leg, with a ruff of dense white fur around its neck and a coat the color of fresh snow, dappled across the flanks with dark gray rosettes. Its tail was as thick as my wrist. Its ears were tipped with black. And from its shoulder blades, folded back along its spine in a bloodied tangle, grew two small, ragged, silver-feathered wings.

One of them was broken. It hung at a bad angle. The animal was bleeding from a gash along its ribs, panting through bared teeth, and when it saw me it flattened itself against the rock and hissed with all the venom of something three times its size.

The eyes were silver.

I knew them at once.

Wingborn Snow Panther.

I had never seen one. I had read about them, in a monograph at Calloway, and the monograph had been very short because nobody who had met one had lived to write more. They were the rarest creatures in Halvern. They lived at the highest peaks, in the thin cold air. A mature one could outrun a locomotive and take down a bull. Their cubs, if captured, sold for more than a House could earn in a decade.

And this one was lying at my feet, wounded, a cub of perhaps six months, with a Hollowback's claw-marks across its side.

I understood at once what I was looking at. The Hollowback had been hunting it. It had chased the cub down the cliff and pinned it under the rubble. And I, in the process of killing the beast, had saved its prey.

The cub hissed again, weakly. Its eyes never left my face.

…

I should like to say that I was moved. I was not. I was a hard, cold, tired creature in a bloody shirt who had come to the Gorge for one purpose, and I had not planned for a cat.

But I was also a person of arithmetic.

A Wingborn Panther bonded to a human was worth more than a Senator. It would grow. It would learn. It would fight beside me in the Gauntlet and fly over the heads of my enemies and be a thing the Houses would covet. It would be a weapon, a scout, a symbol, and an ally in a world where I had none.

And it was dying.

"Don't bite me," I said.

It bit me.

I bore it. It sank four small needle teeth into the meat of my thumb and held on with a grim, shaking determination. I looked down at it. It looked up at me. A thread of my blood ran down its chin. Its eyes were fierce. It was shaking all over, the way a thing shakes that has made up its mind to die rather than be helped.

I did not pull away.

"You are an idiot," I told it. "You are also exceedingly valuable. I will have you know that those two facts are not as unrelated as you suppose."

It let go, very slowly.

I knelt down by the boulder, brought my bloodied thumb to the creature's muzzle, and said what I'd read in the monograph, in the dry little voice of a woman reading a recipe. "A pact. Not a leash. You'll eat well. You will not be sold. I will not ask you to love me." I turned my wrist so the Bronze Sigil caught the light. "I will, however, ask you to fight."

The cub looked at the mark. It looked at me.

Then, with great hauteur, it licked the blood from my thumb.

Something went through me, sharp and bright. A warmth, a quick click, as though a small gear had dropped into a notch. A second pulse, light and quick and wild, beat in the back of my head, fast as a bird's. I felt a flood of emotion that was not mine: affront, outrage, a dignified, furious humiliation. I laughed out loud.

"I did not say I would do the work for free," said the creature's mind, quite distinctly. "I am a Wingborn. I will eat only meat of the first quality. I will not carry your parcels. I do not take orders."

"Noted," I said.

"It is merely a convenience."

"Of course."

"You may call me Nimbus."

"I wasn't going to ask."

A pause. The cub, lying in the dust with its broken wing and its dignity in ruins, turned its head away.

"You smell of smoke," it remarked.

…

I carried Nimbus down the last of the slope in the crook of my good arm. It endured this with a rigid, martyred patience, as a bishop endures a bath. I set splints on the wing with strips of my own shirt and a pair of matchsticks. I fed it jerky from the pack, which it ate with obvious disgust. We sat together by the foot of the cliff under the first stars, and I watched the Gorge mist swirl and curl in the dark below, silver in the moon.

Somewhere down there, a very long way down, the Hollowback's body lay burning.

Nimbus got to its feet. It swayed a moment, then shook itself, and with a stiff, pained dignity walked across the shelf to the far side of the passage where the beast had stood. It sat down, with its tail round its feet. Its ears pricked.

I got up and joined it.

Where the Hollowback had stood, the black staircase plunged toward the dark. But half-hidden at its base, behind a slab of fallen stone, there was a crack. A long vertical wound in the rock, narrow as a doorway, and out of it, steadily, there rose a draft of heat.

It was not the warm, rotten air of the Gorge. It was dry, and clean, and faintly smelled of old iron and ash. It tugged at my sleeve.

And in my chest, for the third time, the Emberheart beat twice.

"That is the way," said Nimbus, unwillingly.

I looked at the crack. I thought of Hawk's lowered voice, the map in my pocket, the blank fourth tier.

Don't go down.

"I know," I said.

I stepped through.