Chapter 107: Seventeen

[Day 8 of 40. Night.]

They came across the ice in a ragged, silent crowd, holding torches made from strips of somebody’s cloak, and none of them said a single word until they reached the foot of the gangway.

Then they saw the bodies, and the silence somehow got worse.

The four soldiers of the Tortoise lay scattered across the ice where the crescent had left them, eight pieces of men and shields in a long black smear that ran straight to a gash in the side of the ship. The chain boy lay face down a few paces away. Somewhere above them, on the deck, Fenn had stopped screaming, and there was a new knot in the boards beside the brazier, round and dark and roughly the size of a man’s head.

And under the ice at the foot of the hull, a boy in fine furs hung in the clear black water with his arms flung out, running.

Jory made a small, choked sound, turned away and was sick.

The fool came down the gangway carrying Freckles.

She had stopped humming the moment the shard died, and she clung to his neck now with both arms, shaking violently, with her face pressed hard into his shoulder so that she wouldn’t have to see anything. The Merrow girl and the lesser-house boy came stumbling down behind him, wide awake, holding on to each other.

Nobody in the crowd moved toward him.

Nobody had to tell them what had happened. They had all watched it from the rock, three hundred paces away, in the light of the blue fire: a little masked figure with a bell on his cap walking across the ice into eight trained Rank Ds, and walking out again alone.

He hadn’t been hit once, not one single time!

Aren set Freckles down on the ice, and she let go of him and backed away three quick steps before she seemed to realize what she was doing. She stood there staring at him with her own frightened eyes.

He crouched down to her height, so as not to scare her any more than he already had.

"You’re all right," he told her quietly. "It’s over now. I promise."

She didn’t answer, and she didn’t come back to him either. After a moment, Sigrid stepped forward and put an arm around the girl’s shoulders and drew her gently away into the crowd.

He stood up again, and found Kaela standing at the front of them all with her lance in her hand.

She hadn’t leveled it; she held it upright at her side, and her knuckles were white around the shaft, and she was looking at the gash in the hull of the ship. It was a long, clean, curved cut, as wide as a man was tall, and the edges of the wood had gone grey and cold, as if the thing that cut them had eaten something on its way through.

She had stood in front of a cut exactly like it once before, in the dark at the bottom of her own mountain.

Then, at last, she looked up at him.

"Take off the mask."

The whole crowd went silent at once.

"No, Captain."

"Take it off."

"I’m afraid it’s the only face I’ve got."

Kaela took one step toward him, then another, until the point of her lance was resting very lightly against the cracked white cheek of his mask. Her hand was shaking, and he didn’t think it was the cold.

"Four of those men on the ice were mine," she told him in a low voice. "Brann was mine. I’ve known him since he was sixteen."

"I know." He didn’t move away from the point. "They stopped being yours a few nights ago, Captain. You saw the footprints. They were only walking around in your men’s bodies, and I didn’t have any other way to stop them."

"And Haskel?"

"Haskel was going to burn a fifteen-year-old girl to the bone to make me kneel."

Kaela didn’t answer that, but her eyes moved over his mask, over the cracked eye hole and the painted crooked mouth, trying to see through to the face underneath by sheer force of will.

"I know what you are," she whispered, so that only he could hear it. "I know exactly what you are. I watched you do it."

"Then you know I’m not going to take the mask off, Captain."

Neither of them moved, and the torches hissed and spat in the wind. Somewhere under the ice, the frozen soldiers creaked as they turned to face the fool.

Then Kaela lowered her lance, and stepped back.

"Not here. Not in front of them." She looked out across the ice toward the dark star hanging over the center of the lake. "But you and I are not finished."

"No, Captain. I didn’t think we were."

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

He turned to Ivo.

The man with the blue hands was standing at the edge of the crowd, and he was looking at the fool exactly as he had looked at the frozen soldiers on the first day, with a deep and careful fear. He didn’t speak; he reached inside his coat, drew out the folded square of oiled leather that he had taken back from the fool on the rock to mark the Throat on it, and held it out.

"You knew I’d ask."

"I knew you’d need it," Ivo answered hoarsely. "Every soldier in this lake follows you now, fool. If you stay with us, the next time they walk, they’ll walk straight through the rest of us to reach you."

"Yes."

"So where will you go?"

Aren looked out at the black star.

"To the center. It wants me, not them. I’ll take every one of those things under the ice as far away from all of you as I possibly can."

Sigrid’s head came up sharply from the crowd. "Alone, at night? You can’t possibly be serious!"

"I’m perfectly serious. It’s the only funny thing about me."

Nobody laughed, which seemed fair enough.

He tucked the map inside his shirt, beside the eel-skin bundle and a string of wooden prayer beads, and settled his cap until the bell hung straight. Then he turned his back on all of them and walked out onto the open ice toward the middle of the White Hollow.

Under his feet, ten thousand frozen soldiers turned in the ice and began to walk with him.

He heard the crowd behind him draw in a breath all together. He didn’t look back, because if he looked back, he would see Freckles’s face, and he didn’t think he could keep walking after that. She reminded him too much of his sister.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 0%. Reach: 10 paces.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 34%.]

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 1/2.]

[Sleepless Watch: Night 5/5. Ends at dawn.]

[After dawn, the Host must sleep for one full day. The Host cannot be woken.]

’Right. I’ve got until dawn to find somewhere on this lake where I can sleep for a whole day without dying.’

He walked faster, then faster still.

He walked for what felt like hours through the black, with the cracking of the ice all around him and the dark star growing overhead. The map said that past four hundred paces the soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, and it was true. Beyond that, the map ran out at five hundred, and after that there was only Ivo’s careful, frightened handwriting in the margin.

’I did not go further. I do not know what is further.’

Already the sky was going grey in the east.

He could feel the sleep coming toward him, a long slow heaviness at the very edge of his mind. He had perhaps a quarter of an hour left, and there was nothing out here but open ice, and dead men standing in it, and the cold.

’Think! You’ve got one use of Zero left, a full Familiar, and no time at all.’

Then he stopped walking, because he had just understood something.

The sleep wasn’t a feeling. It was a debt, and the System had written it down for him in plain words. One full day. It was a number, the same as a weight or an edge or a boy’s warmth, and he had spent the whole night proving what happened to numbers when he put his hand on them.

’It’s a cooldown. It’s just a cooldown wearing a nightcap.’

He laid his palm flat against his own chest, feeling faintly ridiculous, and reached for the one use he had left.

[Reduce to Zero: Sleepless Watch, sleep owed. 1 day → 0.]

[Uses today: 2/2.]

[Cost: Reduce to Zero enters cooldown. 1 day.]

The heaviness vanished.

It didn’t fade or ease. One moment the sleep was rolling up over him, and the next it had never been owed at all, and he was standing on the ice wide awake, with the grey dawn coming up and his head as clear as cold water.

[Sleepless Watch: Debt cleared. Night 0/5.]

’One day without Zero, against one day lying asleep in the middle of this lake. That’s easily the best trade I’ve made all week!’

He laughed out loud, and ten thousand frozen soldiers turned their faces up toward the sound.

Then Iron Sense brushed something ahead of him in the half-light, and he stopped laughing.

It was iron, a great deal of iron, buried deep beneath the ice, far bigger than any sword or helmet or ship’s nail. It was shaped like a ring, an enormous one, and in the middle of it there was a wide hollow space with no soldiers in it at all.

Beneath that, very faint and very slow, there was blood bound into the iron, older than anything he had ever felt.

He walked forward until he stood in the exact center of the ring.

The count rose up through the ice and into the soles of his boots, close and clear, as though it stood right behind him.

Seventeen.

"Seventeen," he answered, wide awake. "Naught. I’m still here."

And beneath his boots, in the empty heart of the iron ring, something very large and very patient knocked once on the underside of the ice, as softly as a guest at a door.