CHAPTER 41

When I get to Essa, half-propped up by the Golden Door’s pedestal, illuminated by the stark red light, I find her still conscious, breathing, and clutching a shoulder that, to my eye, looks thoroughly dislocated.

“Don’t move it,” I say. “Keep it still and breathe. The worst of the pain is over.”

“Take the gauntlet from my hand,” she says, hissing through her teeth. “I’m useless.”

The drake lets out another roar. It’s blinking less now, and Rev and Hilde’s distraction tactics look less and less effective. As I watch, a swing of a paw rips Hilde’s sword out of her hand. The dwarf retreats, shield between her and the beast, yelling at Rev who is yelling herself.

“Take the gauntlet!” Essa growls. “They need you!”

I look down at the gauntlet entwined with red veins. Essa’s sword is lying next to her on the sand, gleaming wet with drake blood. I see myself emerging from the Challenge a drakeslayer, strong enough to stand up to any Godtouched. Would Medrein like a son like that? Would Dala chide me yet be secretly proud of being mother to a hero? Would Katha…

“No.”

“Don’t be a coward!”

“Rue.” I place my hand against the pedestal and Rue makes his way to the top, buzzing nervously. Then I crouch to put Essa’s good arm around my neck.

“What are you doing, you fool?” she says through a pained grimace. “They’ll die! Your sister!”

“I’m not a coward,” I say. “I’m not. But I’m not leaving you here to die. Not when there are better ways to do this.”

I drag her, mostly against her will, to the other side of the Door, where I lay her down, struggling, on the sand.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t think for a moment that you’re being a hero. You’re killing them!”

“I’m not, you damned idiot!” I snap. “I’m trusting them to handle themselves while I get you back on your feet!”

“My—?”

“Let me work.”

I kneel next to her and move her arm away in an arc until it’s perpendicular to her body. She realizes what I’m about to do and her breathing picks up. Her eyes are closed, her teeth gritting together.

“I’m going to pull now…”

“Just do it.”

And so I do, pulling slowly but firmly away from her body, even planting a foot against her side for leverage. She doesn’t scream as much as she lets out a protracted roar, a slow, rasping moan of pain that I do my best to ignore. With a clean pop, the shoulder snaps back into place. Essa gasps. A single tear escapes her eye and slides down her face to wet the hot sand.

“All right,” I say. “You don’t have time to recover. Get yourself away from the door.”

She nods. And then I reach down and, gently, slip the gauntlet off.

“Take the sword,” Essa says.

“Why?” I answer. “It would only spoil my aim.”

When I reemerge, ignoring Essa’s curses, the battle has only turned to the worse. The drake has just shaken off its blindness, and the shield, for all that Hilde smacks it with her closed fist, fails to produce its light. Out of charges? It’s Reva who keeps the drake away from killing them both, Reva, who this same drake burnt, who’s probably staring down the gullet of a type of pain she can’t even bear to remember.

I fasten the gauntlet around my good hand using my teeth and slather the side of the door with what little glue I can coax from the leather bottle. Then, I grab the magical rope looped around my waist.

It comes undone with a tug. I swirl it in the air, gauntlet glowing, and with a throwing motion the rope extends, searching for something it can knot itself on. Thankfully, that thing happens to be the giant drake taking up a huge amount of space in the room.

I watch as the golden thread loops around the drake’s thick neck as it is about to strike against Rev, and then pull with all my might. To my surprise, I’m not pulled off my feet by a two-ton lizard; instead, the gauntlet glows bright red and my weight seems to increase many times until we’re matched. I yank on the rope again, enough to destabilize the beast, to make it turn its angry eyes to me.

This time, its sudden gallop does take me by surprise. I have no speed left. All I can do is turn around and run behind the door. I hear the drake’s steps on the sand, the heavy rumble of its roar, and am surprised to find it slowing down. It closes in on the Door with a kind of respect that reminds me of the cyclops so long ago, opening and closing the Ebony Door as if it were the main entrance to the most holy of sanctums. Silence almost descends, with Rue’s buzzing on the pedestal taking up most of the vacant aural space. When the drake’s massive head appears to my left, peeking around the Door to find me, I’m ready. I just jumps, running as fast as I can, feeling like a rabbit under the watchful eye of a hawk.

As I hoped, the drake jumps too, but to catch me. It hits the door’s frame, biting on empty air, and then rushes to follow me, snapping its teeth.

But it can’t. It touched the glue on the Door, the remainders I’d hoped and prayed would be enough… and they were. The drake strikes, roars, but it can’t move away from the Golden Door.

I step back, sweating, undoing the gauntlet’s straps. The drake roars again, dripping blood and saliva, straining to get away from the Door, to reach me. It’s a terrifying and pitiful sight at the same time.

Back to Rev and Hilde. Essa is moving to them as well, one arm stiff to her side, the other holding on to her longsword, which drags on the sand behind her.

“We did it!” Hilde yells. “I can’t believe it!”

“Not yet, not yet!” I say, running still. I get to Rev, who’s rushing to help Essa, and push the gauntlet into her hands. “You have to. It’s not over while it has the door.”

Rev only hesitates a moment with a sideways look at Essa before extending her hand and letting me fasten the gauntlet around it. The roar continues. The straining sounds, the stomping of paws on sand.

“Hilde, watch for Metalface,” I say, still busy tying straps with one hand and my teeth. Rev is trying to help me with her off hand, which only makes it so we get in each other’s way. “They could try something now.”

“Malco,” she says in a low voice. “It’s coming.”

There’s a groan, metal on metal, like something twisting.

“Malco!”

“What!” I finish the last strap and turn, expecting to find Metalface and its gang descending on us, taking advantage of our wounds and our fatigue, of the fact that we just did all of their work for them.

Instead, I see the drake. The Golden Door, along with a light-streaming pedestal and a metallic platform attached to the underside of its frame, has been pulled out of the sand. It hangs to the drake by a few inches of tough, scaly hide. And the drake is moving. It’s not charging, not yet, but it picks up speed, and suddenly its drag is a walk, and then the walk a trot. It opens its mouth, its throat glowing bright like coals.

Gong!

Hilde smacks her shield and a piercing white light shines on the drake’s hate-filled eyes. It shakes its head, blasting fire all around it and glassing the sand around itself, but it doesn’t stop, the momentum undeniable now, teeth bared to end us.

Rev dashes forward. She meets the half-blind drake with a running thrust, the gauntlet glowing vividly, the spear held in two hands, and dives into its mouth. The spearhead bursts out of the back of the drake’s skull with Rev half-inside it. The reptile makes a sound between a moan and a yawn. It slips to the side, weighed down by the Door, and, settling it on the sand like a heavy, tiring weight, closes its eyes.

Dead.

Essa’s shout is nearly as loud as my own. Hilde slams her shield again, and again, and again, bellowing in joy. All three of us run to Rev as she escapes the beast’s maw, trips on its lolling tongue, and then stands there, disgusted, panting, happy.

But we’re too late.

I do not hear the arrow’s whistle. I only see Rev stumbling, a hand to her side, and a dumbfounded expression on her face. The tip protrudes out of her body just above her hip bone. My feet come to a rest in the sand. I do not understand, and I do not hear or see the second arrow until Essa pushes me to the ground and the projectile zips just above my head.

I fall on my hands and pain blinds me, white-hot lead coursing down my arm and into my brain. I hear Hilde’s voice from very far away, her arms around my shoulders as she pulls me up onto a crouch ad urges me forward. Essa has already gotten to Rev.

We crawl to them. Hilde takes the brunt of my weight with one arm while holding the shield above our heads with the other. She says comforting things that I ignore. I get to Rev. Her hair is sprawled on bloody sand and I I’m sure some of it has to come from the drake because it’s impossible for one person to bleed this much.

Essa is grabbing onto the arrowhead and I put my hand on top of hers, stopping her before she can do more damage. I cradle Rev’s head, feel her pulse and her breathing. Torniquet, I think, but it’s one thought among many concurrent ones. There’s nothing to torniquet, nothing to separate from a heart that inches closer to death with each beat.

And that’s when sound returns, bringing me out of my confusion. Someone is making a speech, the sound reverberating in the circular arena.

“…thank you lot for going to all that trouble when you didn’t even have the Ruby. Maybe you didn’t notice, is my guess, but in any case, I don’t think I’m thanking anyone. I’m just gonna make good on my promise from before: you’re gonna die, all of you. How does that sound? Joro’s a man of his word.”

Metalface. I can hear his slow footsteps, the drag of his axe on the sand, and suddenly I realize I can hear all sounds, everything at once, each one distinct and important. Rue’s buzzing somewhere by the pedestal. The twang of a bow and an arrow sinking into the drake’s body, our only protection. Rev muttering fevershly to herself, unconscious, Essa grabbing Rev’s leg and cursing in a long stream of words empty of meaning or direction. Only Hilde is at work, unfastening the gauntlet from around Rev’s arm. Around the noises, there’s silence. A knot of many different silences wrapped tight together, to the point of bursting.

“Not coming out?” Joro asks in a good-humored voice. “Guess you’re waiting for us to come to you, huh? You being a tactical lot and such. Well, it didn’t work so good back with your friends in the pool place, did it? Boy, were they ever sorry they sided with you, Essa. Were they ever.”

The stream of cursing ceases. Essa breathes in and out slowly, almost solemnly.

“I see,” he says in the silence that follows. “Well, then, I have a better idea than us staying here talking forever: if you don’t step out of there, Dego is going to bring his bow around to that doorway there in front of you and he’s going to poke you full of holes.”

I dig through my pockets and pull out the red potion. It sloshes around in its very resilient container. Medrein said not to use it, but never why. Was it too dangerous? Would it kill me? As Rev’s life drains away before my eyes, I realize I don’t really care at this point. It would be nice to know what it does. As I’m about to uncork it with my teeth, Essa touches me on the arm. She nods down to the sand, where a die has rolled to show a blank face. She opens her hand, palm up.

“Just go there and kill them!” says another voice. It’s the girl with the polearm. Leh-something. “They’re finished, we just need to slice their throats and—”

“Shut up,” Joro says without a hint of annoyance. “Or I’ll kill you. We have to be tactical now ourselves, don’t we? Right, Dego, you can go around and kill one or two. Leave Essa to me.”

I bring out the other die before placing both in Essa’s hand. She turns Hilde’s shield’s concave side up and shakes the little cubes. They clatter – like tiny hands brought together in prayer to Lady Luck – and drop.

The dice clang, jump, and roll, circling each other until they come to a stop. Hilde’s eyes are screwed shut while she mutters fervently to herself.

“What’s that noise?”

“Metalface?” I ask.

“What did you—?”

“Goodbye.”

“Speed!” Essa’s yell drowns out whatever Metalface tries to say, and then she’s not there anymore.

Hilde opens her eyes wide, looks at me and then down at the dice. Ten pips, a six and a four bumped together at the very bottom of the shield.

The sounds coming from behind the drake are chaotic. The girl calls out, Joro yells, and a squeaky voice, belonging to Seef, the mousy kid with the daggers, rises up into a terrified yell before, in time with a slicing noise, they cease completely. The girl curses, we hear her stamping on the sand, perhaps to get away, but another sound follows swiftly after, almost like a patter, a flutter. A blade sinks into someone. A body tumbles to the ground, gasping.

And Metalface comes running around the drake, one half of his face sweating and twisted with fear, the other, steel-grey, perfectly at peace. He’s still moving, still thinking, trying to find his angle and arriving at a conclusion as soon as he spots us crouching there on my sister’s blood. He’s coming to take hostages, I realize as Hilde pulls her shield up with her gauntleted hand. His axe is raised high and he’s looking somewhere behind us to the arena.

“I’ll do it,” he threatens. “I don’t care if you kill me, I’ll do them first. I swear.”

I think of what I felt when I rolled the dice to escape the drake. Like my feet turned to wings and I was gliding through the sand instead of running, like all my life I’d been tumbling and suddenly understood how to use my body. That was on a three.

“Joro,” I call out.

He doesn’t answer. His focus is intense. Unblinking.

“Metalface!”

His good eye moves to me. It’s just a flicker, a minuscule lapse in concentration, but it’s enough. Before he can look back up Essa is there, a blur swinging, burying her sword in Joro’s neck. It only sinks partway, catching against the metallic skin after cutting through everything else. Joro opens his mouth, grabs the blade that’s sticking out of him. His eyes never leave Essa until he finally dies.

“Gods…”

It’s Dego, arriving a little out of breath. We turn to look at him, all three in unison. His bow is up, the arrow nocked, but he hasn’t pulled it back. Essa takes a step towards him, but stumbles. Her time is up.

Blast.

The bow swivels in her direction.

“L-look,” he says. “I don’t want anything to do with you. This wasn’t even my plan, it was all them. I just want a key; I know you have more than one. Give me a key and I’ll just go and no one else has to die.”

Hilde stands, shield in hand.

“You shot Reva,” she says simply.

“I’m sorry,” Dego says. “I had to. Joro, he made us, he did. Please. I just want the key.”

The shield jumps from Hilde’s gauntleted fist with a burst of red light. It flies the short distance like it was shot from a catapult, and the sound it makes when it smashes against Dego’s head isn’t the sort of sound that leaves living things in its wake. The shield slams against the wall behind, sinking into the brick wall.

No other sounds disturb the quiet of the first level. We look at each other in the silence, me, and Hilde, and Essa, our faces dirty and bloody and amazed at being alive. Then, as one, we look down at Rev.