Chapter 109: The Tallymen

[Day 9 of 40.]

He sat on the edge of the hole until well past noon, with his legs dangling over the drop, turning the Lung-Stone over in his fingers and looking down at the drowned city.

The stone was about the size of a hen’s egg, blue and cloudy and so cold that it burned his palm through his glove. Something inside it pulsed slowly, once every few heartbeats, and every time it pulsed he felt his own lungs tighten in sympathy.

He opened the window and read it.

[Lung-Stone (Hollow).]

[The heart of a drowned breath.]

[While the stone is held, the Host does not need to breathe.]

[Charge: one hour. Recharges at dawn.]

’One hour without breathing. And directly beneath me, a city sitting at the bottom of a lake.’

It was a terrible idea, and he knew it. He also knew that he had come to this lake to get stronger and to find out what the Choir was, and that both of those answers were lying down there in the dark, under a gate with his own symbol carved across it.

’Every sensible person would wait for help. Luckily, I’m a fool!’

He tucked the bell inside his cap so it wouldn’t ring, wrapped his fist around the Lung-Stone, and dropped into the hole.

The cold hit him with a thousand knives!

For a single heartbeat it was the worst thing he had ever felt, worse than the Abyss or the chain in the mountain or Haskel’s burning hand. It went straight through his furs and his skin and his flesh and into the marrow, which had been tempered for this.

Then the Familiar woke up and ate the rest.

[Devour Breath.]

It spread out around him in a thin black sheath, a hand’s width from his skin, and the water inside that sheath stopped being cold. It wasn’t warm, exactly. It was nothing at all, neither warm nor cold, and he hung inside it in the black water like a moth inside a lantern, wide-eyed and not breathing and ridiculously comfortable.

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 61% → 63%.]

’Two percent just for jumping in. This lake is trying to spoil me.’

He swam downward.

The frozen soldiers ended about twenty feet below the surface. He passed the last of them on his way down, their boots and greaves dangling in the clear ice above him, and then there was only open water, motionless and dark, and the city coming up to meet him.

It wasn’t dark, he discovered. Set into the walls of the buildings, at every corner and above every doorway, there were round stones exactly matching the one in his fist, and each of them glowed with a faint, steady blue light. The whole city was lit by a thousand drowned lungs.

He landed in a street.

It was paved with black stone and swept clean, and the houses on either side were tall and narrow, with pointed roofs and round windows. Every door stood wide open. There were no bodies anywhere, no bones, no broken furniture, nothing at all to say that anyone had died here. It was a town where everyone had apparently stood up from their tables one evening and walked away together, leaving their doors open behind them.

Above every doorway, carved into the lintel, there was a row of small straight marks, like the tally a shopkeeper keeps of what he’s owed.

’Counting. Everything down here is counting.’

He followed the street toward the center of the city, toward the gate, and Iron Sense came alive as he walked.

There was iron everywhere. It was in the hinges and the window bars and the long chains that hung across the streets between the roofs, and in every single piece of it, faint and slow and unbearably old, there was blood. It was the same blood he had felt in the nails of the ship and in the ring above. Whoever had built this city had bled into every piece of metal they owned, carefully, deliberately, signing their names in blood.

The street opened onto a wide round plaza, and there was the gate.

It was even bigger up close, a great round slab of black iron set upright in a frame of stone, three times the height of a man, with the empty circle carved across its face so deeply that he could have lain down inside the groove. In front of it, arranged in a perfect square, stood four figures.

They were tall and thin and made entirely of iron, with long jointed arms and heavy hands, and each of them held a short iron rod across its chest. They had no faces. Where a face should have been, each of them wore a smooth, round plate of iron with nothing on it at all.

He was still twenty paces away when all four plates turned toward him at once.

[Tallyman (Construct, Rank C). Count: 4.]

’Audit. That’s a new one.’

The nearest Tallyman took one step forward, and its voice came out of the blank iron plate like stone grinding on stone.

"Count."

He knew this game. He had been playing it on the ice for eight days.

"Naught," he answered. In the dead silence of the water, his voice came out strange and muffled, but it came out. "I’m here."

The four Tallymen considered this. Then all four of them raised their iron rods together and came at him.

They were fast, much faster than anything that heavy had any right to be, and they moved in perfect, terrifying unison. The first rod came down at his head with a force that would have crushed a horse’s skull.

He caught it.

The shock went through his arm and his shoulder and down his spine into the street, and the black paving stones cracked in a star under his boots. Four hundred and thirteen points of strength met the iron and held it, barely, and for one long heartbeat the two of them strained against each other in the drowned plaza, boy and machine, and neither moved.

’Rank C. All right, now we’re talking!’

The second Tallyman came from the left. Street Fighter’s Instinct saw it a heartbeat early, the weight shifting in the iron hips, and he let go of the first rod and turned with it, so that the second blow went past his ribs by a finger’s breadth and slammed into its partner’s shoulder instead with a clang that rang through the whole city.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 79% → 81%.]

The Familiar strained against his ribs, and he held it back.

’You can’t eat iron, sweetheart. Sit this one out.’

He drew his hand back and pulled the black power up out of his chest.

[New Moon.]

[Essence: 84% → 66%.]

The crescent tore through the water so fast that it left a long, boiling trail of bubbles behind it, and it hit the third Tallyman squarely in its blank iron face. It didn’t go through. His crescent struck something and stopped for once, and the iron plate rang loudly, and a long black scar opened across the empty circle.

The Tallyman staggered back three full paces and stood there swaying.

He didn’t give it time to recover. Moonlit Step took him across the plaza in a single silver stride, and he planted his feet behind the damaged construct and hit the scar with his fist, everything he had, the full weight of a body tempered four times over and a heart that beat once every two seconds.

The iron plate caved inward with a sound like a cathedral bell breaking, and the Tallyman toppled backward and lay still on the paving stones, with a fist-shaped hole in its face.

’One!’

The other three came at him together.

It was a real fight, the first real fight he’d had in days, and he loved every second of it. They were stronger than any Rank D, fast and coordinated, and they never got tired. A rod caught him across the back and threw him into the wall of a house so hard that the stone cracked behind him. Another clipped his shoulder and he heard something go. Perfect Blood began knitting it before he’d finished landing.

[Perfect Blood. Shoulder: healing.]

But they were machines, and machines were predictable. By the third exchange Street Fighter’s Instinct had learned their rhythm, because all three of them always struck in the same order, left, right, center, every single time. By the fifth exchange he was slipping between their rods before they even began to swing.

He broke the second one’s knee with a stamp that cracked the street, and while it was still falling, he tore its rod out of its iron hands and drove the rod back into its own empty face.

’Two!’

The last two stopped moving.

They stood motionless, side by side in front of the gate, with their rods raised. At first he thought they were gathering themselves for a final rush. Then he realized that they weren’t looking at him at all.

They were looking at his chest.

The Familiar had come halfway out of him without permission. It was coiled loosely around his shoulders in the black water, purring, and it was looking back at the two remaining Tallymen with what he could only describe as recognition.

The Tallymen lowered their rods.

Then, slowly, with a long shriek of ancient joints, both of them went down on one knee on the black paving stones and bowed their blank iron faces to the boy in the cracked fool’s mask.

[Tallyman: Ledger recognized.]

[Audit suspended.]

Aren stared at them.

’Ledger. They recognized the ledger. Not me, the thing inside me.’

Behind the kneeling Tallymen, with a deep groan that he felt in his teeth, the great round gate began to turn.

It rolled slowly sideways in its stone frame, and the black water poured in through the gap with a roar. It dragged him with it. He tumbled through the doorway in a rush of foam and bubbles, slammed into stone, rolled, and came up gasping on a smooth, dry floor.

Air. There was air in here, cold and stale and very old, trapped under the city for centuries.

[Lung-Stone: 9 minutes remaining.]

Behind him, the gate rolled shut again with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling, and the water stopped.

He got to his feet.

He was standing at the edge of a cavern so vast that the blue light from the stones set into its walls didn’t reach the far side. The floor was black stone, polished smooth. The ceiling was lost somewhere in the dark overhead. And in the middle of the cavern, rising out of the floor, there was a pillar of black iron, and something was hanging on it.

Iron Sense told him what it was before his eyes did.

Chains. Hundreds of them, running from the walls and the floor and the darkness overhead, every one of them as thick as a man’s arm and carved all over with the same marks he had seen on the chains across the Rift at Kharn. They all met at the pillar. And at the pillar, they all met in one body.

It was a man, or it had been a man once. He was enormous, half again the height of a Tallyman, and so thin that his ribs stood out under grey skin like the bars of a cage. The chains crossed his chest and his arms and his legs and held him spread against the iron, and through each of his hands and each of his feet and through the middle of his chest, a single black nail had been driven deep into the pillar behind him.

Aren knew those nails. He had carried one across a city wrapped in a shirt. He had watched Brother Ansel try to drive one into a broken chain at the bottom of a mountain.

’Five of them! Five nails, holding one man.’

He walked closer, with the two kneeling Tallymen somewhere far behind him on the other side of the gate, and the Familiar coiled tight and quiet under his ribs. It wasn’t purring now. For the first time since the Throat, it was silent.

At twenty paces, he could feel the blood in the nails. It wasn’t the old slow blood of the drowned city. It was the prisoner’s own, still moving after three hundred years, and it was hot.

At ten paces, the prisoner opened his eyes.

They were pale gold and sane. That was the worst part. Aren had expected madness, after three hundred years in the dark. What looked back at him was patient and clever and wide awake.

The cracked lips moved. The voice that came out was dry as old paper and so deep that he felt it in the floor.

"Count."

Aren held himself motionless under that golden stare. Then he answered, because it seemed to be the only thing anybody down here ever wanted.

"Naught. I’m here."

The prisoner looked at him in silence. His gaze went from the cracked fool’s mask to the hands at Aren’s sides, and then down to the middle of his chest, where the Familiar lay coiled and silent under his ribs.

Then the prisoner began to laugh.

It wasn’t a pleasant sound. It was low and cracked and enormous, and it went on and on, and the chains rang softly against the pillar while it lasted. When it stopped, the golden eyes were wet.

"Something that eats singers," the prisoner whispered. He breathed in slowly, as a starving man breathes in the smell of bread. "I can smell them on you. A verse, and a gift, both still fresh." The golden eyes narrowed with interest. "I don’t know what you are, little masked thing, and I don’t much care."

[Unknown entity.]

[Rank: ???]

[Status: Sealed (5/5).]

Aren didn’t move. He had a very strong feeling that he shouldn’t!

"The singers nailed me to this pillar on the night they drowned this city," the prisoner went on softly, almost tenderly. "And they told me that nothing in the world would ever be able to hurt them again." The golden eyes drifted to the nail in his own chest. "I’ve been waiting three hundred years to find out whether they were lying."

He smiled. His teeth were very long.

"So tell me, little masked thing. How badly do you want to hurt the Choir?"