Was the beast talking? She wanted to risk a real sight glance but couldn’t relinquish the Ikosmenia for a moment or she’d end up in chunks.

Christina provided the real image of what she faced as the creature advanced on them, the safe gap narrowing. It made her insides cramp up in horror.

A fever dream aberration of mismatched human and spider parts—She banished the image from mind for fear of locking up rigid with terror.

You need to gain distance, Bianca whispered urgently. Ready when you are. I have the Professor leashed to you. I will try not to break him.

“Give him!”

“Come get him,” she challenged back and launched twin fireballs at the thing. Her fireflies drew in the power she fed them, enlarged to a swirling vortex of fire around, and loosed on the thing.

She saw the barriers forming even as she shaped the illum, a defensive armour on the great storm, each thrust of her attack met by a barrier. No matter. When they detonated to a cloud of smoke and dust, she launched out the nearest gap, straight over into abyss, dragging Ludwig behind her on a tether. His weight spun her around for a moment before Bianca took control of her flight.

Do not dare faint.

Ludwig screamed and flailed wildly as Bianca drew him closer. Tallah grabbed his coat and brought his body against hers.

“Hold on tight or fall to your death,” she urged through gritted teeth.

Ludwig’s answer was a gargled scream of mindless fright. His hands gripped on her coat and his arms locked rigid around her. She fell with him, leashed a tether to a statue, and was flung across the great black abyss.

The creature followed.

It sees us, Christina observed.

Yes. It keeps trying to cut my tethers, Bianca confirmed what Tallah feared. Like the white creepers, this also seems to enjoy an Egia’s sight.

It meant it could follow anywhere.

“Whatever illum you’re storing, drop it,” Tallah urged Ludwig. He drew breath for another scream but she headbutted him. This close it was the only way to shut him up. His breath stank. “Do as you’re told, and we may live through this.”

Dropping my reserves, Christina confirmed.

Tallah release some of her power, feeling naked to the danger. But it couldn’t be helped. If the creature was the Egia girl in some absurd way—and the bulbous head growing on the side of that nightmarish concoction pretty much confirmed it—then she needed distance and she needed to hide.

“It was Erisa. The girl. The girl, Tallah.” Ludwig screeched against her face, and she would’ve done anything to be able to throttle him just then.

Her stomach lurched and acid scorched the back of her throat as Bianca cut the tether drawing forward, turned them about in a whiplash twist, yanked forward and cut again to allow them to sail through the air. The creature chased and built barriers in her path. They were too far out across the gaping maw of the abyss, so none of them found purchase. At least some of the normal rules still applied. A barrier needed an anchor to be useful. Bianca’s range exceeded that of the beast’s, her tethers able to grip where the barriers couldn’t gain purchase.

I’m pulling us back into the city. That gallery ahead. The moment we hit rock I’ll drop all illum. Be ready to run.

Like a kicked dog. Christina did not enjoy the idea of running and hiding, but there was really nothing else to do. Their enemy could see their weave and counter it. Whatever rules Sil and other healers had to abide by were inconsequential to it. Any more fighting without preparation would be foolish, and this wasn’t the kind of distraction Tallah could afford.

Her flight lurched to avoid a leaping spider. It missed her by a hair and dropped off into the black beneath. More leapt as she approached the city. Bianca pulled them in bursts, as if swinging on a web, in and out of the galleries, flying by pillars at breakneck speed with hair’s breadth precision. One mistake and they’d smash their heads against the white marble.

If only she could close her eyes to this…

Be ready.

They’d lost sight of the creature and Tallah forced herself to purge the rest of her illum store. If not for the adrenaline, she would’ve fainted for the sudden painful depletion. For all his terror, Ludwig had also released his store.

Her flight brought them through a gallery on the topmost part of the city. Bianca angled them among columns, up and under jutting balconies, swinging them in bursts and bleeding off speed gradually the deeper they went into this tight cluster of dwellings. Here, bridges spanned between balconies, sculpted to details Tallah could not appreciate at speed.

Bianca seeded their rush with decoy tethers to confuse their monstrous pursuer.

Now.

The final arc of their flight had no tether. Tallah braced for impact as a window grew large in her spinning peripheral vision. Rhine was there, arms outstretched, waiting to embrace them.

Bianca’s strength dissipated entirely as they hit the ground and crashed straight through the wraith and onward through ancient furnishings. Spider silk cushioned their impact. Five rolls to a full, sticky stop. Her head slammed against something to an explosion of blinding lights.

A cacophonous crash of shattered wood and pottery, detritus untouched for who knew how long turned to the dust it was destined for. Sense flooded back into her with the realisation that she’d passed out and the rush of fear that the spiders might be on them. Rhine loomed above, empty gaze offering nothing.

“Get off. Get up.” Tallah blinked away constellations of stars and pried a half-unconscious Ludwig off her. Webs held her stuck fast to the old blighter. His eyes were glazed over and his lips moved soundlessly, all of him inert in terror. He fainted before she could drag herself fully up.

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Tallah punched and kicked herself free of him.

“Blast the soul out of you, useless bastard. Get up.”

A good kick in the ribs had him stirring. Another had him cringing and gasping for breaths he’d screamed away.

“Get up." She stooped and dragged him off the floor and away from the ruins of their crash. She scanned the new rooms for an exit to lead somewhere away before that monster picked up their scent. Her nose bled. Statues stared blindly down at them. “We need to go before it comes for us. I can’t fight that thing.”

“The girl lives. It was her. By the gods, what have I done?” Incoherent mumbling wasn’t going to help. She resisted the urge to strike him again.

“It’s not her. Your trinket doesn’t pull to it.” She looked up and met Rhine’s hollow stare, and choked on her own scream. Her sister wasn’t there anymore than the old man’s girl was. No time now for her imagination to rush in and play havoc.

“It’s her!” Ludwig protested, voice rising to a keening squeal.

“It’s not. Move.”

How unreasonably heavy the man was when despairing, a bag of bones that resisted her efforts to preserve his meaningless life. Where were they? How far off-course had their flight brought them?

We’re not that far away from our initial position, Bianca whispered. I brought us back as close as I dared, just further in, near to the last sight you had of the trail. I don’t want the boy dead any more than you do.

She’d never been as thankful for Bianca’s uncanny mind for numbers and equations. It was only her cool that had saved them and maybe—hopefully—the boy as well.

First chance she had, she’d get that blasted thing off Vergil if she found him with head still attached. It was proving more trouble than just leaving the wretch unattended.

A wet spot formed on the side of her head and throbbed in urgent pain. Blood turned her hair sticky and itchy as it oozed down to her neck and under her shirt. Lovely.

“There’s an exit there.” Ludwig pointed to a side passage.

All of Grefe seemed built of passages and balconies and bridges and eyries. Being out in the open made Tallah’s skin crawl and every hair on her body stand on end.

One exit was as good as any other, if it went inside and not out. She drew her sword and stumbled forward, avoiding the wraith as it kept invading the corners of her sight. Was it getting bolder? Closer each time?

Drink a draught, dear. You’ve hit your head rather hard.

Judging by her wet trouser leg, the draught she’d saved up was no longer there and she didn’t dare try and open a rend for more.

“I’ll manage.” And she’d rely on her ghosts to see what was and wasn’t there in truth.

“Wh-wh-what do you believe that was?” Ludwig asked as he fell in step besides her. “You are certain it wasn’t… Erisa?” Whatever teeth he still had chattered as he threw fearful glances over his shoulder.

“Dangerous is what it was. More than you saw.”

And bloody terrifying in ways he wouldn’t grasp in the moment, struck dumb by his fear. She knew a healer’s weave when she saw it and had observed Sil’s work innumerable times. Those had been barriers sure as she bled, and they’d been used in ways that she’d been assured was impossible.

I knew it could be done. The hen lied. The cheek of her!

Hardly cheek or intent, in Tallah’s opinion. More Hepius secretive nonsense most likely, and a lot to think about with regards to the lost Egia, still alive somehow and come to hunt them.

Light began to dim. Not like sunset on the surface, but a sudden drop in intensity with clear intent to bring the day to an end. Crystal veins shimmered inside, their strange patterns all shifting as one together with the outside spires.

Sweat stung her eyes and she lifted the mask to give herself a respite from the riot of illum in this place and got a better look of what was happening.

Red. The entire city bathed in red, like a tide of blood washing across the crenelated spires, black shadows growing out of nooks and corners. Grefe settled into its gloom and—it might just have been Tallah’s imagination—even the background noise of water dropping into the abyss lowered its intensity to a simple, barely-there whisper.

A wisp of illum zoomed past her head when she donned back the Ikosmenia, its normal flow altered. By what?

She spun and backhanded Ludwig with such force that it left her wounded back and sides screaming in agony. He’d drawn in a gasp of illum and almost shaped it into a sprite. She was more worried of that than the echoing crash of pottery upturned and shattered where the old man stumbled.

“Let it go,” she whisper-barked at him. “Now, before it catches your scent, you cretin.”

He obeyed even before stirring from the wreckage. She looked out for that stormy stirring from earlier but only met Rhine’s cold, blank stare, her features even more grotesque in the blood light.

Why was the ghost unaffected by the Ikosmenia? She never even disturbed the illum that passed through her, the only defined sight visible through the mask.

Because it’s not here, Christina said. I can’t get rid of the presence because it is in your head. Try and ignore it.

Otherwise, nothing coming. For now.

“Stop dawdling and get up. I didn’t hit you that hard. And stop that pathetic moaning or I leave you as you lay.”

“I said nothing.” Ludwig protested as he struggled up and made even more ringing noises. No echoes sounded, quite as if something smothered and swallowed whole the sounds. His voice and her own came out muffled, like in the labyrinth before.

But something did moan. In the dead silence that followed once Ludwig shook the dust off himself and joined Tallah in the narrow passage, a faint moaning scratched at her ears.

“Do you hear that?” she asked to confirm it wasn’t some new form of torture from her wretched sister.

“Aye. Moans. Some trap, likely. They can produce that sound easily enough.”

Whatever waited, she crept forward to meet it, sword in hand, mask lifted off her eyes. Sweat mixed with blood in a stinging, blinding concoction that she kept having to wipe off her face.

What a peculiar kind of night this was. Once she grew accustomed to the light, it was rather pleasant. And the whisper of running water helped ease her nerves. Rhine intruded constantly now, always present at her elbow, never seeming to move and yet always within arm’s reach. She considered swinging her sword at the apparition just to vent some frustration but felt foolish at the notion.

Christina was right. It was all in her imagination. No other explanation fit.

She should sleep, recover some strength, and move forward fresh. Her head throbbed and the rest of her chaffed under the strain of anticipating a battle to come. To keep her fingers touching the illum flow, ready to grasp and draw it in, but careful not to, was an exhausting effort. She had little patience left over for her sister’s demanding wraith and whatever riddle it presented.

Ludwig dug out a torch from his backpack, along with a box of alchemical matchsticks.

“I only have one.” He gave a rueful smile and struck a match to light the thing. A blob of alchemical fire disturbed dust in the air for a heartbeat, then settled into a warm glow.

“One’s going to be enough. Be ready to swing it if something comes at us.”

She promised herself she’d rest once past whatever next hurdle came their way.

Rhine shook with mute laughter at her side.