"Immune to fire," Ashkar said eventually. "To my fire, which nothing has been immune to."
"To darkness," said Benedict.
"To force. To pressure. To the collapse of space around it." Almond spat out the leather and breathed. "To poison, to cutting, to erosion. It's not resistance, it's refusal. There has to be one thing. John said there's always one thing." He looked up at the four of them ringed around him in the firelight, and at the Infernal Knight standing sentry beyond it, and he grinned through the pain with his teeth stained red. "So we stop hitting it. We start reading the ground."
"That," Benedict said, "is the first sensible thing you have said in nine days."
"You wanted to set the river on fire."
"It was a suggestion."
The clue had been in front of him since the first hour. He had simply not known it was a clue, because it did not look like a monster. It looked like geography.
