Chapter 29: The Serpent

It began as a chuckle. Then it became a giggle. Then it was a full-throated, helpless, delighted roar, echoing through the empty hall like a bell, and Fel, staring, felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

“Thank you,” Saladin gasped. Silver tears ran down his cheeks. “Oh, thank you. It worked. It worked.”

“What worked?”

“The Tolls.” He turned his head. His eyes, one cracked, one whole, were shining. “Did you think they were a burden? They were a lock. One for Pegoris. One for Knoxia. Two keys. And one for the King.” His chest heaved. “It never mattered who won, Felanor. It only mattered that someone lost.”

The floor began to glow.

Thin lines of silver light crawled outward from Saladin’s body across the black glass, and Fel realized with a slow, cold horror that the floor was not glass at all. It was a lid. Beneath it, in the depths, lay an enormous circle, ring within ring, glyph within glyph, drawn in silver blood and wide as the Hall itself. It was lighting up ring by ring, like a great slow eye opening.

Red sigils burned to life in the stone. Black flame licked the pillars.

Five figures stepped out of the shadows behind the empty throne.

They wore heavy black cloaks with deep hoods, and their faces were hidden. They moved in perfect silence. They formed a ring around the circle, and they began, in low, dry, ancient voices, to chant.

It was not a language Fel had ever heard. It was older than the Empire. It was older than the Dichotomy. Every syllable made his teeth ache. The air grew thick, and the temperature dropped, and the sound seemed to come not from the throats of the hooded men but from the floor, from the walls, from the dark itself.

“Get up,” said Fel to his own body. “Get up. Get up.”

His legs did not answer.

Saladin sat up.

The black sword was still in his chest. He put both hands around the hilt, and slowly, casually, pulled it out, and dropped it on the floor with a clatter. His wound did not close. It poured. Silver blood ran from the hole in an ever-widening flood, and where it touched the sigils it hissed and blazed.

“I am so tired of having a shape,” said Saladin.

His body began to deform.

It started at the shoulders. They rolled. They widened. His spine cracked, then cracked again, and the sound of it was like a tree splitting in a storm. His skin split open along the seams, and beneath it there was no muscle, no bone, only a seething, gleaming column of quicksilver. His fingers lengthened. His legs fused. His jaw unhinged, and unhinged, and unhinged.

He was still muttering.

The chant grew louder. Black light poured from the circle. The five hooded men threw back their heads and howled the last words in a single voice, and the air itself tore.

Something came through.

It came through slowly, the way a tide comes through a crack in a dam. First there was a scale, silver, the size of a shield. Then another. Then a coil, thick as a tower, sliding up out of the circle in a long, shimmering, silent loop. The Hall trembled. The pillars groaned. Above them the mirrored ceiling cracked from wall to wall.

The head rose last.

It was a basilisk’s head, broad and flat and armored, with a mouth full of teeth like curved swords. Its eyes were silver mirrors, huge and calm and utterly without pity. It rose higher and higher, until its jaws brushed the broken ceiling, and it looked down at the tiny bleeding boy on the floor.

Hello, little king.

The voice was inside his skull.

It was soft, and it was vast. It was Saladin’s voice, and it was not, and it was older than the first star. It rolled through his mind like a slow wave, and every thought he’d ever had went quiet.

I am Jörmungandr. I have slept for a very long time. The boy was kind enough to carry me.

Fel could not move. He could not breathe. No one in the hall could. The five cloaked men stood frozen in their circle, hoods raised, mid-word, their hands lifted like statues. The whole vast chamber had gone still under the weight of that presence.

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I am hungry.

The great head dipped, and the five hooded men were gone.

It happened so quickly there was no time to scream. One instant they stood, and the next there was only a wet snap, and a swallow, and a ripple passing down the length of a silver throat. The serpent’s coils shivered. It grew. Its body swelled, thickened, lengthened, pouring out of the circle in an endless, shining river, and the ceiling cracked open, and the walls buckled.

It ate the throne.

It ate the pillars, one after another, like sweets. It ate the black glass, tearing up great slabs and crunching them between its jaws. Everything it swallowed made it larger, and everything it grew made it hungrier, and the Hall of the Empty Throne, which had seemed so vast, was suddenly the inside of a jar.

I will begin with the school, said Jörmungandr, conversationally. Then the city. Then the rest.

“No,” said Fel.

It came out a croak. He dragged himself to his knees. Blood ran down his face. He gripped the golden saber in one hand and the black sword in the other, and he did not know where he found the strength.

“No. I won’t let you.”

You are very small.

He threw himself at the serpent.

It was the stupidest thing he had ever done. He knew it while he did it. He crossed forty feet of broken stone in a run, and leapt, and drove Krashing Fyr into the nearest silver scale with everything he had left. The blade skidded off. It did not even leave a mark. The serpent turned its enormous head and regarded him with mild interest.

A coil swept him aside like a fly.

He hit a pillar. Something in his back gave way. He slid to the floor, and got up, and ran at it again, and again the coil took him, and again. Each time it was a little slower to strike. It was playing. It was amused.

Stop, said Jörmungandr. I want to show you something.

The world went white.

He was standing in a city. It was a city he knew. It was the Citadel of Vows, all three tiers, from the Shallow Gallows to the Merchants’ Meadow to the black Keep on the hill. And it was burning. Every street was a river of fire. Every tower was a torch. People ran screaming through the streets, and behind them, coiling through the sky, came a silver shadow the size of a mountain.

He saw the Willow’s Drip, and it was ash.

He saw the Sanctum, and it was rubble.

He saw a girl with black hair and crimson eyes, lying in the ruins of a garden, her face twisted in a scream that made no sound. He saw a boy with golden hair, kneeling in a field of ash, holding a handful of sand and weeping. Their faces were distorted, melted, stretched with pain. Their mouths opened and closed, opened and closed, calling a name, over and over.

It was his name.

This is what comes, said Jörmungandr. It is not cruelty. It is simply the shape of things.

“Stop,” Fel whispered. “Stop it.”

Look.

He looked. He could not shut his eyes.

Then the vision broke, and he was on the floor of the Hall, and a huge silver coil had closed around his left leg.

It lifted him.

The floor fell away. The broken ceiling rushed toward him. He hung upside down in the air, dangling by one ankle, ten stories above the ruined stone, and the great mirrored eyes swung slowly around to look at him.

The jaws opened.

They were the size of a gate. They were lined with rows of gleaming teeth. Beyond them lay a throat that went down and down and down into the dark, and from the depths of it came a slow, warm, stinking wind.

Farewell, little king.

And time slowed.

It did not stop. It was not Silence. It was something else, something quieter and more personal, the strange stretched stillness that comes to a man in the last second of a fall. Fel hung in the air, and the serpent’s jaws hung open beneath him, and he had all the time in the world.

He remembered the Willow’s Drip.

He remembered Tori’s long grey hair and her lanky arms and her laughter, her hand pressed over his mouth. Take this. The sword is named Falling Star. He remembered the smell of clove.

He remembered Orcus, hurling a bar across a room, laughing, ripping up the floorboards with his fists. Get out of here, ya twat! He remembered a wooden leg and a growling voice, Your projects, not mine, Tori, and the way the old man had always slipped him an extra heel of bread when he thought nobody was looking.

He remembered Vili, in the mud of the Sorrowmire, saying I was seven years old. He remembered the sound of two silver fingers curling into a fist for the first time.

And last of all, he remembered Loria.

Not Loria in the Lantern Row, sugar on her lip. Not Loria at the Cradle, flicking his forehead. Loria lying in a crater of bone and fire with her arm crushed and her breath rattling. Loria, small and broken and powerless, who had never once been powerless in her life.

He remembered how she’d looked.

I won’t, he thought. I won’t let it look like that again.

Something lit in his chest.

It was small, at first. A spark. A warmth. But it grew, fed by every memory, every regret, every scrap of grief and love he had never had the courage to say. It rose up through his ribs. It filled his throat. It ran down his arm, into his hand, and into the warm golden hilt of the sword he had carried across a continent without ever knowing why.

If he was going to die, he thought, he was going to take the damn thing with him.

“Krashing Fyr,” said Fel.

He poured everything he had into it.

Every memory. Every Belief. Every reason to live. Every name. He poured it in until his bones sang, until the blood ran hot beneath his skin, until his split scar burned like a brand. The sword drank it. It was warm in his hand. It was hungry. It had waited, he understood, for a very long time.

The blade woke.

Light exploded from it, pure, blinding, resplendent white, not silver, not gold, but the color of the sun at noon. It struck the ceiling. It filled the hall. It poured through the cracks in the walls and flooded the ruined stone, and it did not stop, it went on and on, brighter and brighter, until there was nothing in the world but light.

The serpent screamed.

It was a sound that shook the mountain. The great silver head reared back, the jaws snapping shut, the mirrored eyes squeezed tight. The coil that held Fel loosened, and loosened, and let go. He felt himself falling. He felt a great wind. He saw a wall of white rush toward him, and beyond it, for one brief moment, something that looked like a green and endless sky.

Then the light went out.

It went out as fast as it had come. There was a sudden, complete darkness, and a silence, and a long, slow, tumbling fall.

He hit the ground.

Everything went black.