Rook Fenwall's Arc

Chapter 7 of 11

Rook reached the bottom of the tunnel and stepped into a wide stone room. The knights' bones lay scattered across the floor. Their swords lay beside them, snapped and dull. He counted the dead and understood. They had struck the creature. Their good steel had done nothing. Somewhere in the dark ahead, the thing that killed his people waited behind a hide no blade had ever cut. He knelt by the nearest knight. The man's sword had bent against something harder than iron. Rook drew his own new blade and pressed the edge to a fallen breastplate. It bit deep. Sharp enough for men. Not enough for the horror. He needed a weapon these knights had never carried, or a wound they had never found. A soft light spilled from a crack in the far wall. Rook followed it into a low chamber. Tiny dragons clustered there, bright as scattered gems, red and blue and gold. They fed on glowing leaves that grew from the wet stone. He had seen their kind before in the grove. They knew the true leaves from the false. Now they clung to something in the center of the room. A lance stood upright in the rock. Its head was pale stone, not steel. The little dragons crawled over it and licked at a clear juice that seeped from its length. The same sharp-smelling juice as the true blooms. Rook understood. The knights had brought steel. Steel had failed. But one of them had carried this, a point of living stone, and had died before he could use it. Rook gripped the shaft and pulled. The lance came free with a scrape. It was heavy, heavier than his sword, balanced for a mounted charge. He turned it in the low light. The stone head held an edge no whetstone made. Deep in his gut he knew a swung blade would never do the work. This weapon was built to be driven home at speed, with the full weight of a rider behind it. A sound reached him then. Slow. Wet. Something large shifted in the black beyond the chamber, and the leaves trembled on their stems. The dragons scattered upward in a bright storm and vanished into cracks in the ceiling. The cold air stopped moving. The creature had heard him. Rook set the lance across his shoulder and faced the dark passage. He had the weapon now. He knew the wound that could pierce the hide. But he could not drive a charging lance on foot, and the thing was coming, and there was no horse in all this buried place. He needed speed he did not have. He stepped back toward the tunnel, and above him, far up in the dark, he heard the drag of stone claws on rock as something answered his weight on the stairs.