Chapter 108: First Lung

[Day 9 of 40.]

The second knock came while the sun was still climbing out of the mountains.

It was louder this time, and closer, a deep hollow boom that rose up through the ice and into the soles of his boots and set the bell on his cap trembling all by itself. All around the edge of the iron ring, the frozen soldiers flinched in the ice. Every one of them turned its face away from the center, as if it couldn’t bear to look.

Aren stood where he was, in the middle of the ring, and waited.

[Reduce to Zero: Cooldown. 23 hours remaining.]

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

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 34%.]

’No Zero until tomorrow morning. Fine! I still have a crescent, a pair of legs, and a pet that ate a priest’s gift for supper.’

He had expected to feel afraid, out here alone. What he actually felt, standing in the grey light with ten thousand dead men around him and something enormous knocking under his feet, was lighter. There was nobody to protect, nobody to fall over for, and nobody watching him except the dead. For the first time since the wagons left Kharos, he didn’t have to pretend to be anything at all.

The third knock cracked the ice.

A thin black line ran around the inside of the iron ring, following the buried metal, and white mist came breathing up out of it. Then the line split wider, and the mist came faster, thicker, curling up around his ankles and then his knees.

The mist began to stand up.

It rose out of the crack in shapes, dozens of them, then scores. They were tall and thin and roughly the shape of men, made of pale breath and frost, with long arms that hung nearly to the ice and faces that were only two dark hollows and a hole for a mouth. They swayed, and every one of them turned toward the boy standing in the middle of the ring.

They didn’t have eyes, but he could feel them looking at the warmth inside him.

[Hollow Breath (Spirit, Rank D). Count: 47.]

’So that’s what the breathing is. The lake doesn’t breathe. These things do, every three hundred heartbeats, all night long, and they take a little of everyone’s warmth each time.’

He thought about fourteen candidates on the first night, sitting down on the ice and never getting up again. He thought about the girl from the lesser house, alone at the edge of the circle.

Under his ribs, the Familiar lifted its head.

It wasn’t hungry. It had eaten the Throat and a soldier’s song and a priest’s blue fire in two days, and it was full to bursting. But it looked at those forty-seven pale, swaying shapes exactly as a cat looks at a bowl of cream that someone has carelessly left on the floor, and it purred.

Aren considered the Familiar thoughtfully, and then the spirits, and then the long empty lake all around him with nobody on it to see.

’You know what? Go on. Enjoy yourself.’

He didn’t point. He opened his hand and let go of the leash.

The Familiar went out of him in a long, lazy black ribbon, unhurried, almost playful. The nearest spirit reached for Aren with its long pale arms, and the ribbon brushed past it, and the spirit was gone. It didn’t scream or struggle. It wasn’t there anymore, and a little puff of warm air drifted across the ice where it had been standing.

The rest of them noticed.

They came all at once, forty-six of them, surging inward from every side of the ring with their mouths gaping and their long arms reaching, and the cold came with them in a wall so bitter that the air itself cracked and sparkled. Frost raced up his boots. It climbed his legs and crusted his coat and burned in his lungs when he breathed.

He laughed out loud, because it didn’t matter in the slightest.

The Familiar went through them hungry and quick, as it went through everything. It darted and doubled back and snapped, a black streak weaving across the inside of the ring, and wherever it touched a spirit, the spirit ended. Three went in a single bite. Five vanished together when it swept through the middle of them. One of them got close enough to lay its pale fingers against his cheek, colder than anything he had ever felt, and he turned his head and looked at it through the eye holes of his mask.

"I’d move," he advised it.

It didn’t. The Familiar took it from behind.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

The windows came so fast that they stacked up on top of one another in front of his face, a long blue column of them, and he gave up reading them and watched.

It took less time than a fool’s song. By the time the sun had cleared the peaks, there was nothing left inside the iron ring but a little warm mist drifting over the ice, and a boy standing in the middle of it with frost all over his coat, and a black shape coiling back into his chest, fat and slow and enormously pleased with itself.

[Hollow Breath (Spirit, Rank D). Count: 0.]

[Ledger entry added: The breath of the Hollow (Day 9). 47 spirits.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 34% → 49%.]

The cold that came with it went straight into his bones and settled there, deep in the marrow, heavy and quiet. It didn’t hurt this time. It felt like something being built.

’Fifteen percent for standing still and watching. I could really get used to this lake!’

Then the ice beneath the crack heaved upward, hard enough to throw him off his feet, and the fourth knock came from right underneath him.

He rolled and came up in a crouch. The black line around the iron ring had torn wide open, as wide as a doorway, and out of it, something was climbing.

It was the same shape as the others, but it was enormous. It rose up out of the dark water in a great column of white breath, thirty feet tall, then forty, until it towered over the iron ring and the long arms hanging from its shoulders reached right down to the ice. Its face was a smooth, featureless oval of frost, except for the mouth, which was wide enough to swallow a cart.

When it breathed in, the whole lake breathed in with it. He felt it in every frozen soldier for a mile around, felt the faint warmth in their sleeping blood dragged toward the huge pale thing in a single long pull. His own breath was torn out of his chest so hard that he staggered.

[Hollow Breath, Elder (Spirit, Rank C).]

’Rank C, and no Zero until tomorrow. Perfect timing.’

He found he was grinning behind the mask anyway.

The Elder looked down at him with its blank, frosted face. Then it bent toward him, its vast mouth opening, and breathed out.

The cold that came out of it wasn’t the cold of the ice or the wind. It was the cold of the deep places, the absolute stillness at the bottom of the lake where nothing had moved in three hundred years, and it came down on him in a solid white column, and the ice around his feet shattered into powder under it.

Moonlit Step took him sideways in one long silver slide. The column came down where he had been standing and drilled a hole in the ice twenty feet deep.

[Moonlit Step. Mastery: 49% → 52%.]

He came out of the step running, straight toward the thing’s base, and as he ran he drew his right hand back and pulled the black power up out of his chest.

[New Moon.]

[Essence: 91% → 73%.]

The crescent went up into the Elder’s body and opened it from hip to shoulder in a long black gash. White mist poured out of the wound, but it didn’t fall. It hung in the air, swirling, and slowly began to knit itself back together.

’Naturally. You can’t cut fog!’

But the gash was still open, for a few heartbeats at least, and inside it, at the very heart of the Elder, he saw something hard and bright and blue, about the size of a fist.

He grinned again.

"Go on," he told the Familiar softly. "Dessert."

The Familiar slid in through the wound eagerly.

The Elder screamed.

It was the first sound any of the spirits had made, a long, thin, rising shriek that shook frost down off every peak around the lake. The towering white body convulsed. Its long arms beat at the ice and at itself, and its huge blank face twisted. The gash in its side tore wider and wider from the inside, because something was eating its way out!

Then the scream stopped.

The Elder came apart all at once. Forty feet of frozen breath turned back into ordinary mist and drifted down over the iron ring in a soft, warm, harmless rain, and the Familiar came floating back out of it, swollen and dark and heavy, carrying the blue stone in its jaws like a dog bringing back a stick.

It dropped the stone into his palm. It was cold enough to burn, and inside it, something pulsed, slow and faint.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: Hollow Breath, Elder. The Hollow’s first lung.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 49% → 61%.]

[Familiar of Nothing has grown.]

[Familiar of Nothing: Juvenile → Adolescent. Reach: 10 → 30 paces. Feeding no longer costs essence. It may now hunt alone.]

[New ability: Devour Breath. The Familiar may eat cold that has a will.]

[Item acquired: Lung-Stone (Hollow).]

He read it all twice, standing in the warm mist with the stone burning in his hand.

’Thirty paces! And now it can eat things that are alive, or at least things that want something.’

He looked down at the shadow curled under his ribs.

"You’ve had a good morning, haven’t you?"

The Familiar didn’t answer, but he could feel it purring contentedly, deep down in his bones.

Far away across the lake, toward the shore, he became aware of a strange, deep silence. It took him a moment to understand what it was. One of the Hollow’s great lungs had just stopped forever, and everyone back on the rock, and on the ship, and in the frozen soldiers all across the ice, would sleep a little warmer tonight.

Then the last of the mist cleared, and he looked down at the ice in the middle of the ring, where the Elder had climbed out.

The hole it had left was round and clear, and it went down a very long way. At the bottom of it, far below the frozen soldiers, far below anything he had imagined the lake could hold, there were rooftops.

Hundreds of them. Towers and domes and long sloping roofs of dark stone, streets and bridges and squares, an entire city lying silent under the water.

In the center of it, directly beneath his feet, stood a great round gate of black iron.

And carved across the gate, as wide as a house, was a plain round circle with nothing in it.