They Left the Healer to Die Below, So I Came Back Up With the Monster's Heart novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Floor Seven
Her party leaves Liesbet pinned under a fallen roof with the floor's warden coming, she pushes her mending the other way and the beast comes apart, and the Gold on the top step tells her the last healer with a hand that color was dead by morning.
"Healers follow," Sander said, and pointed his spear at the back of the line.
I went to the back of the line.
I had walked there for eleven years, on every floor of the Deep under Aldenbrug.
I carried the lamp, and my white healer's cord hung on my shoulder.
We were on the seventh floor that night, deeper than my little brother had ever been.
Daan walked just ahead of me with his new iron cord and a lance he kept touching to make sure it was still there.
He was nineteen, and he wanted to stand in front of something just once.
"Let me take point," he whispered over his shoulder.
"Let you take a nap," I whispered back.
Sander Verhoeven wanted the warden.
Every floor of the Deep has one warden, the biggest thing living on it.
Its heart glows for a year, and the guild ranks you by the floor it came from.
A seventh-floor heart would make Sander a Silver, and he had been telling every tavern on the market square so for a month.
The archer behind him wanted her share.
She was a Steel with blue beads in her braid, and she never let me forget what mine was.
"A twentieth for the healer, Raes," she said. "You hold the lamp, you get a twentieth."
"I can count," I said.
Then the warden came out of the dark at the end of the hall.
It was the size of a cart horse, pale as a grub, with too many legs and no eyes.
It found us by sound, and we were all breathing.
Sander put his spear into its side, and the archer put three arrows into its head.
It screamed and threw itself against the wall.
The roof came down.
A slab of stone landed across my right leg, and I heard the bone break before I felt it.
When the dust cleared, the warden was half buried too, only yards away.
Its legs were already clawing it loose.
"Get her out!" Daan shouted. "Sander, lift the stone!"
Sander looked at the slab on my thigh.
It would have taken two men a minute.
He looked at the warden pulling its body free of the rubble.
"Healers follow," he said. "Follow if you can."
The archer bent and took the lamp out of my hand.
"You won't need this," she said.
Daan swung at Sander, and Sander hit him in the head with the butt of his spear.
Then Sander threw my brother over his shoulder and ran.
The last of the light went up the stair with them.
I lay in the dark and listened to the warden tear itself out of the stone.
I put my right hand on my own thigh and started to mend.
A healer's bare hand on a wound puts it back the way it was.
A cut takes a minute, but a thigh bone takes an hour.
I had less than a minute.
The legs clicked closer across the floor.
At fifteen I swore the healers' oath at the House on the hill, the same as every healer in the city.
We swore never to harm the living, never to carry a blade, and always to follow.
The warden's leg came down beside my head, cold and wet.
I knew how a body was put together, because I had spent eleven years putting bodies back.
I reached up in the dark and laid my left hand flat on that leg.
Then I pushed the mending the other way.
It was like pulling a stitch instead of setting one.
Something under my palm gave along its seam, and then the next seam gave, and the next.
The warden screamed again, higher.
I didn't take my hand away.
I felt the leg come loose at every joint, then the hip it hung from, then the long pale body behind it.
It came apart along every place it had grown together.
When the screaming stopped, something on the floor was glowing.
It was the warden's heart, as big as two fists and bright as a lamp.
By its light I saw a heap of pale pieces where the warden had been.
I also saw my left hand.
It was grey from the fingertips to the wrist, the color of cold ash.
I laid it on my thigh to help the right hand finish.
The skin under my palm split along its grain.
I snatched the hand away and pressed it to my chest.
It had forgotten how to mend.
It took me most of the night to mend that bone with one hand.
When I could stand, I picked up the heart and climbed toward the city by its light.
The Mouth is the stone stair in the middle of the market square that goes down into the Deep.
I came up its last steps at dawn, limping, with the heart under my arm.
The guild always keeps a Gold on watch at the top.
That morning it was Joris Declercq, the Guildmaster's heir.
He was tall and dark, with a nose broken twice, a plain black coat and a gold cord on his shoulder.
Across the square the guild hall's doors stood open, and I could hear them singing.
It was the song they sing for a healer who doesn't come back up.
Joris looked at the heart, and then at my hand, and the color went out of his face.
"Put that hand in your pocket," he said quietly.
"The last healer who came up these steps with a hand that color was dead by morning."
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