Tallah

Heartbeats later, when he managed to gasp in a breath and open his eyes, Sil loomed over him, as much as anyone could loom while down on their knees.

“Cut me out,” she said, mismatched eyes pinning his.

“Give me a moment,” he croaked back.

“Now, Vergil. Move.”

“Right.”

How long had the drop been? Every little bit of him protested as he tried to roll over and get up. Argia tried to announce something but he couldn’t read whatever the headware had to say just then.

“This smarts.” He struggled to grip the sword again. He’d fallen on his left arm and it now hurt like all buggering Hell as he tried to clutch it against his chest. Hopefully not broken, but Sil could fix him. “You’re still bleeding.”

It took some effort to free Sil’s hands and she immediately reached out a hand in what Vergil could recognise as her way of opening a Rend. She flinched back and shook her fingers as if bitten by something, then tried again.

“Sil?”

“Shut up. Let me focus.”

Sweat beaded on her pale face and she seemed faint as she forced herself. Sweat then turned to blood.

“Sil! Stop. You’re bleeding.”

She ignored him, gritted her teeth, and a small black portal opened up at her fingertips. She reached in and snatched a small bundle bound in cloth before the thing fizzed out of existence.

“Not what I wanted.” She grimaced in misery and cradled her hand and bundle to her chest. “We’ll manage…”

“You can’t channel?”

“Doesn’t take a genius to see that. I can’t heal us. Help me open this. My arm hurts too much to move.”

They kneeled around the small reserves she’d managed to retrieve. The bundle contained thread, two hooked needles, two flasks of some solutions, and a single healing draught. Vergil was slowly becoming aware of the throb in his side and the worrying amount of red in his peripheral vision. He avoided looking down.

“Drink the draught,” she ordered him. “Give me the rest.”

“No. You drink it. You’re the one bleeding.”

Sil took the vial and tackled him without warning. “I don’t have the time for this.” She clamped a hand over his mouth and two fingers forced open his lips. Before he could shake her off—and she was so much stronger than he ever thought she could be—she poured the draught straight down his throat, nearly drowning him in the process. Her fingers went away and the heel of her palm pressed up on his chin, forcing him to swallow and choke.

Shock followed and so much fresh pain. His jaw locked up and his back arched with sudden spasms. He blacked out with what felt like someone cutting into his side with a saw. When he came to, Sil was still atop him, her hands under his head, her eyes cold and pitiless as she regarded him.

“Awake?”

He nodded slowly. No healing potion had ever done that. They weren’t supposed to hurt.

“What was that?”

“You ask a lot of pointless questions.”

She pulled her hands away from under his head and he was thankful for the coolness of the rock. Her knuckles were scraped bloody as she shook them.

“Lie still and don’t move. You were hurt bad.”

“Your potions never hurt before.”

“They’re not really potions, Vergil. That would suggest something magical about them. The correct term is accelerant. Drinking one forces you into healing, but it’s your body doing it. You were never hurt as badly as you were now to feel the real kick.”

And he’d drank so many of these things without ever knowing what they actually did. He tried to rise but weariness was set in his bones. Even moving an arm took a grand effort of will.

“Lie down and wait for the effect to pass. You’ve the Goddess’s own blessed luck to be alive considering the state they’ve left you in.”

He groped to his waist and his trembling hand came away blood-slick. There was a rend in his gambeson as if something had tried to bite a chunk out of him. Some kind of teeth were lodged in the threads of his chain-link undershirt. Tummy’s armour had saved his life if the gashes he felt were any indication.

“Thank you, Tummy,” he whispered and forced himself to rise.

Sil was undressed to the waist and sewing up a gash in her shoulder, using his sword as a makeshift mirror. The state of her knotted his stomach and lit an urgent fire in his stomach.

He swallowed down the many pointless gasps and questions that crowded his already addled brain and instead asked, “How can I help?”

Sil glared at him and winced as the hooked needle dug into her skin again. “Black flask. Open it. Rip the cloth and make some bandages. Drench some and bring them over.”

Vergil did as instructed and tried not to wince as he neared Sil’s needlework. Ragged flaps of skin were held together by the surgical thread and the sight of it turned his knees to wobbling jelly. Sil winced every time she tugged on the needle, eyes darting to the many entrances into the room. Once the first gash was done, she instructed him on how to tie off the thread while she dabbed disinfectant on the wound.

She had to sew closed three cuts in her shoulder and a lesser one across her belly. By the end her hand trembled almost too much to hold the needle but she stubbornly refused any help.

“You should have some glue for emergencies” He forced a smile as he pressed the disinfectant to the wound. “I had some on the Gloria, for cuts.”

“Glue?”

“Yes. I had it in a spray. It’d close up any cut until I got to Medical. Had to use it often when I was still in training.”

She wiped tears from her eyes as he pressed the cloth to the cuts. The iron smell of blood mixed with the sharp tang of the disinfectant made Vergil’s head spin.

“May not be a terrible idea. I’ll look into it when we’re clear of here. Why weren’t you crying out?” Sil asked him as he washed and dressed her wounds.

“What?”

“When you fell. With a gap like that in you, you should have been useless. You didn’t cry out and weren’t in shock. Why?”

“Why aren’t you—”

“Answer the question, boy.”

She pulled on her tattered blood-encrusted shirt, finally accepting the offered aid. Hard to dress with a mangled shoulder.

“My headware mutes pain. It’s not foolproof. It’s a safety measure, you know? If I got hurt bad somewhere inaccessible, this was insurance that I could respond to questions and calls.”

“Useful. Should’ve said earlier.”

“Didn’t think about it. It’s not fully reliable. When the… accelerant kicked it, it pretty much shorted me out.”

They both had a sip out of the second flask. “To offset the blood loss,” Sil said. “But we need to eat before we drink it all. Otherwise it’ll only make us both too dizzy and weak to keep walking.” She forced herself to rise and stow the remaining wire and the flasks in her hip pouch.

Vergil made a sling for her damaged left arm and she cradled it tight against her chest.

“You can’t heal yourself?”

“No.”

“But you opened the rend.”

“I did.”

“… it hurt?”

“Something’s wrong with me. I think they injected me with a kind of toxin. Opening the rend felt wrong, like my own power cut me.” She shrugged and winced at the movement. Tears stained her cheeks and she wiped at them, smudging blood across her face. “The Goddess won’t answer my prayer for aid. Tallah said something’s shielding this place. We need to join up with her, and soon.”

To Vergil, she seemed unsteady on her feet as she shuffled forward to look out one of the high windows.

“We’re so bloody high up,” she said, scanning the vista beneath.

Nothing looked familiar. Leaning out showed no bridges anywhere near their wide-open cage, nor any other ways of accessing the place except maybe flying. Or being carried up by spiders sticking to the wall? The closest platform was a leg-shattering distance below. Vergil doubted either of them could survive that drop in any useful way.

“There’s gotta be some passage through the back, right?” They retreated inside and explored the adjoining rooms.

This had definitely been some kind of storeroom. There were the remains of barrels and crates rotting away, their contents long turned to dust. Pots. Brittle weapons with rotted shafts and rusted, warped blades. Room after room revealed only the debris of uncountable years.

And no passages out.

“Why?” Vergil asked as he made his way out of a room too dark to see anything in. The crystal veins inside were shattered, a ragged wound cutting through the walls. Sil tried to provide a sprite but gave up after the third attempt only produced a pinprick of light.

“Why what?”

“Why take us? Did you see anything?”

“No. But they came through my barriers. Didn’t think that was even possible. I held off a daemon once… No, I don’t know why we were taken.”

“Did Tallah lose?”

She shook her head and kicked aside some more pots, letting them smash to the floor into glittering shards.

“They wanted the old man. That was clear as day when the fight began. They barely took notice of me when it started. Even tried to avoid you and Tallah. His story’s foul and we’d best figure out why before we run into more trouble. Help me move this.”

Boxes, rotten through but stubbornly holding together on rusty nails, were piled high against a wall. Something wheezed behind them. Together, they managed to open up a passage that looked to have been dug into the wall, cut narrow and uneven. One box crashing to the floor sent echoes through the tunnel.

Voices answered back.

“Come. Come. Come. Help. Help. Help.” A cacophony of voices, all similar and overlapping. “Don’t leave me alone. Don’t leave me in the dark. Come back.”

Vergil stalked to the doorway, sword held out, waiting for spiders to rush them from the dark.

“What do we do?” Nothing lunged from the pitch. Every hair on him stood on end.

Sil looked worn-out and weary as she studied the room for another way out. But they’d already covered the entire place twice and there were no other exits, at least nothing survivable.

“If you think about it, it makes no sense for them to bait us,” Vergil said when still nothing rushed them but the calls for aid. “Maybe there’s someone in trouble there. Maybe it’s the girl?”

“Keep that sword ready.” A draft whispered through the open passage, cool against their skin, promising an exit into some other place opened to the outside. “They tried the girl voice earlier. It didn’t go well. If they’re smart, they wouldn’t do it again. And if they wanted us dead, I don’t see what would stop them.”

Was she trying to convince him, or herself? The look of fear on her face could have meant anything.

“We go forward?”

“Let’s. What’s the worst that we could find aside from more spiders?”

He knew she was trying to be brave but her voice cracked into a strangled squeak of terror before all words were out.