Free Book of Iron by Elizabeth Bear

scream. Kaulas made no sound except the harsh whuff of expressed air as he was hurled back, arms blown wide.
    Prince Salih stepped in and caught him.
    It was one of the smoothest things Bijou had seen in a long partnership of smooth interventions. Kaulas might have been silent; the prince grunted thickly as the necromancer’s weight struck him. But he was braced, and he only staggered a step backward before arresting Kaulas’s ungainly flight. Bijou covered the distance in three running strides, relieved or furious to see Kaulas’ eyes open blearily.
    “Well.” He raised his hands gingerly, still slumped back against the prince. They were raw, and looked sore. “I’ve identified one of its defenses.”
    “I’ll say you have,” Bijou said, swallowing irritation and amusement. The damned man had an uncanny ability to make her feel two contradictory emotions simultaneously. She took him by the elbow and steadied him to his feet as the prince pushed. “Now what?”
    Nobody spoke, though guilty glances were traded. Guilty, Bijou thought, because everybody felt a responsibility to get them out of this—and nobody had any productive ideas towards that destination.
    Or perhaps she was projecting.
     

     
    Having achieved a stalemate, they waited and paced and thought. Bijou found it necessary to rotate often, in order to even out her temperature exposure between the furnace of Maledysaunte and the icebox of the stasis bubble. It was that—the tension between hot and cold, chaos and order, that let the first threads of the idea drift through her mind. There was something there—but if she pursued it, she knew, she was as likely to knock it away as pull it closer. Like butterflies, ideas were best ignored and left to alight when they would.
    So she paced, too, and stared at her toes, and felt the anxious closeness of her comrades at arms for some time before the tickle turned into an inspiration.
    “Maledysaunte,” she said.
    The necromancer looked up, pulled from her own brown study. “Bijou.”
    “You said the guardian is in the Book. There’s no indication that this could be his doing?”
    “None whatsoever.”
    “And no reason for him to be helping Dr. Liebelos?”
    “I imagine,” said Maledysaunte, “that the Book’s destruction is the last thing he’d desire. It can’t make any mischief if it’s not out in the world, after all.”
    “And he’s a creature of entropy himself.”
    “Yes.”
    Bijou nodded. “And if he wants the Book out in the world, he’s going to want you out in the world, isn’t he?”
    Maledysaunte stood taller, her dark hair breaking over her shoulders. They were attracting the attention of the others. They gathered now, leaning forward, interested.
    “We don’t need to disassemble the stasis bubble,” Kaulas said. “Just punch a hole in it, and then he can help.”
    “That was my thought,” Bijou said. “Can you and Maledysaunte do it by working together?”
    There was a pause as the two necromancers eyed one another.
    “I’d have to stop holding the bubble open,” Maledysaunte said eventually, slowly. “If it didn’t work, I don’t know if I’d be able to re-establish control.”
    Bijou glanced at Prince Salih.
    “Do it,” he said. “I have no desire to find out if I can die of thirst inside a stasis trap.”
    It had just been waiting someone’s determined word to stir them all into action. Maledysaunte took a deep breath, closed her eyes to concentrate, and unwove her spell. Bijou watched as she opened them again, breathed deeply, and stretched her neck until it cracked.
    The returning cold broke over Bijou like a wave.
    “Right then,” Maledysaunte said, and took Kaulas’ raw-fleshed hand in her own.
    It was much as before, except this time Maledysaunte and Kaulas each placed one hand on the wall—his right, her left—and leaned into it. And instead of a lightning-craze pattern of dull red threads, what grew before them was a spiral that turned into