Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

Nobody spoke, though guilty glances were traded. Guilty, Bijou thought, because everybody felt a responsibility to get them out of this—and nobody had any productive ideas towards that destination.

Or perhaps she was projecting.

Having achieved a stalemate, they waited and paced and thought. Bijou found it necessary to rotate often, in order to even out her temperature exposure between the furnace of Maledysaunte and the icebox of the stasis bubble. It was that—the tension between hot and cold, chaos and order, that let the first threads of the idea drift through her mind. There was something there—but if she pursued it, she knew, she was as likely to knock it away as pull it closer. Like butterflies, ideas were best ignored and left to alight when they would.

So she paced, too, and stared at her toes, and felt the anxious closeness of her comrades at arms for some time before the tickle turned into an inspiration.

“Maledysaunte,” she said.

The necromancer looked up, pulled from her own brown study. “Bijou.”

“You said the guardian is in the Book. There’s no indication that this could be his doing?”

“None whatsoever.”

“And no reason for him to be helping Dr. Liebelos?”

“I imagine,” said Maledysaunte, “that the Book’s destruction is the last thing he’d desire. It can’t make any mischief if it’s not out in the world, after all.”

“And he’s a creature of entropy himself.”

“Yes.”

Bijou nodded. “And if he wants the Book out in the world, he’s going to want you out in the world, isn’t he?”

Maledysaunte stood taller, her dark hair breaking over her shoulders. They were attracting the attention of the others. They gathered now, leaning forward, interested.

“We don’t need to disassemble the stasis bubble,” Kaulas said. “Just punch a hole in it, and then he can help.”

“That was my thought,” Bijou said. “Can you and Maledysaunte do it by working together?”

There was a pause as the two necromancers eyed one another.

“I’d have to stop holding the bubble open,” Maledysaunte said eventually, slowly. “If it didn’t work, I don’t know if I’d be able to re-establish control.”

Bijou glanced at Prince Salih.

“Do it,” he said. “I have no desire to find out if I can die of thirst inside a stasis trap.”

It had just been waiting someone’s determined word to stir them all into action. Maledysaunte took a deep breath, closed her eyes to concentrate, and unwove her spell. Bijou watched as she opened them again, breathed deeply, and stretched her neck until it cracked.

The returning cold broke over Bijou like a wave.

“Right then,” Maledysaunte said, and took Kaulas’ raw-fleshed hand in her own.

It was much as before, except this time Maledysaunte and Kaulas each placed one hand on the wall—his right, her left—and leaned into it. And instead of a lightning-craze pattern of dull red threads, what grew before them was a spiral that turned into itself over and over again, writhing, twisting. Bijou tried to watch, but even to a Wizard’s eye, the arcane twisting was nauseating.

She felt the change of air pressure when they broke through, though—and the sparkle of new energy joining them. The guardian must have been waiting for just such an opportunity.

That black hand—utterly black, as if light fell into it, like a shape cut out of the universe—lunged from the gap they had made, and reached toward Maledysaunte and Kaulas. They grabbed his fingers with their joined hands, and there was an abrupt pop—not so much a sound as the shift of air pressure against the drums of her ears.

The stasis bubble unraveled like a snagged sweater, leaving them standing in the chill of the cavern surrounded by the echo of the water running down.

“How long?” Maledysaunte asked the guardian as he stepped back, lowering his hand.

“Thirteen seconds,” he said.

Bijou felt her eyebrows climb, but said nothing. Of course, time had slowed inside the bubble. Of course it had.

They began to smell burning soon after. A dull glow crept around a curve ahead, limning the crooked edge of the stone. Bijou turned off the torch and they made their way forward on tiptoes, each one testing each step before committing his or her weight. Another few cramped strides brought her to the corner.

Mouse-soft, Bijou leaned around the edge and peered up a limestone dam almost as tall as she was to a great cavern that flickered with light and heat. The warmth of wet air made her realize suddenly how cold she was and had been. Skin that had long since stopped stinging and settled into the corrugations of gooseflesh burned anew.

The stream broke over the dam to her left, trickling down the surface in a series of rivulets in yellow and white limestone channels. Beyond that—beyond the limestone wall she faced—another small underground lake stretched to a stony bank beyond. It was from that bank that the light and the smells of burning emanated.

A woman bent over a great stone block, a stalagmite whose top had been sliced away to make a flat surface. A great black anvil was set upon it. Bijou the Artificer owned anvils of every shape and size, from a silver-working rig you could balance on the palm of your hand to a monster four men couldn’t lift. This was the largest she had seen.

The light and heat came from a forge nearby. As Bijou watched, aware of the rest of her group slinking up behind her, the woman—pale-skinned, stripped to the waist except for a leather apron, her long light hair twisted into a straggling knot at the nape of her neck—moved easily between one and the other, stirring coals and checking heat levels. Bijou noticed that there was no bellows and no smoke. A magical fire .

“The Forge Unquenchable,” Maledysaunte whispered.

Bijou gave her a sideways look and whispered back, “It’s in the book?”

Maledysaunte nodded. “It is where the Book was forged.”

Their voices should not have carried across the lake, but perhaps Bijou should have thought about whispering galleys and the acoustics of caves. Because the woman—Dr. Liebelos, of course—stood up from her forge with her fists in her back and stretched tiredly. Sweat gleamed on her face as she said, “Is that you, Wove? I’ve been expecting you.”

“Wove?” Kaulas asked.

But even as he spoke, Salamander moved forward. She set her eft down at the edge of the water and turned right, to clamber up the jumbled boulders that slumped there. They made a kind of awkward ramp or stair, and Salamander scrambled up it.

“Her cradle-name,” Maledysaunte said, already moving to follow. “Let’s not wait for an invitation.”

Riordan required an assist to get up the bank, but still they made it as a group, in seconds. Salamander had paused at the top, hanging back until they could join her. Now the seven moved forward as one, six following Salamander across a narrow stone bridge. Bijou was braced, Ambrosias clattering along beside her. If she were defending that forge, she would strike when her enemies were bottlenecked on the cane-width span.

But Liebelos just watched them come, her hands at her sides, until they reached the far bank and fanned out, three on each side of Salamander.

Bijou noticed that Maledysaunte kept the black-man construct close beside her. His presence—or lack thereof—still discomfited Bijou deeply. But Maledysaunte was right—bringing him along had been the best solution. What else could they have done? Try to fight him, when they were in a hurry, he’d done nothing to provoke them, and they knew nothing of his powers? Leave him behind, and have him following out of sight?