Chapter 11: The Old Quarry

Aren spent three days getting ready, and most of that time went into imagining all the ways he would get caught.

Every night, on the back of an old ledger page, he patiently wrote the list. She sees me. She hears me. Someone sees me leave. Someone sees me come back. A monster reaches her before I do. I get killed. The list got steadily longer each night, which wasn’t exactly encouraging.

The first item was the worst. Vivienne had already seen the Rag once. She was frighteningly clever, and she was actively looking for him. If she saw the same shape again, the same height, the same way of moving, she might start comparing it to every boy in the Academy, and sooner or later she would get to the Servant who carried her books.

On the second night, he stood in front of the cracked window of his room with a fresh strip of cloth tied over his nose and mouth, studying his reflection in the dark glass and trying to see himself through her eyes.

The System answered before he had even finished the thought.

[False Face: Concealment active.][While the Host’s face is covered, observers cannot retain the Host’s physical details.][Height, voice, scent and build will be remembered only as vague impressions.][Concealment breaks if the covering is removed, or if an observer touches the Host’s skin.]

He looked at his reflection again.

It was the strangest feeling. He could see himself perfectly clearly in the glass: his own face, his own shoulders, the strip of grey cloth. But the moment he looked away and tried to remember what he had just seen, the details slid off his memory like water off oiled leather. A shape. Grey. A man, probably. That was all.

’So that’s why she only saw a man, even looking straight at me. Nice. Very nice.’

It was a good tool, not a perfect one. If an observer touches the Host’s skin. He wrote that carefully at the top of his list and underlined it.

He kept the rag anyway. Half the Academy was laughing about the Rag now, and people who were busy laughing at a ghost with a dishcloth weren’t looking for a real person.

On Saturday evening, the moon rose huge and white over the eastern hills.

Aren slipped out through the kitchen yard, where the night porter’s keys opened the gate the cooks used for deliveries. He walked down through the city in an old grey cloak he had bought for two silver in the lower market, with the rag in his pocket and a stick in his hand, like any poor boy heading home late. Nobody looked at him even once.

The north gate closed at sundown, but the wall beside the old tannery had a crack every child in the lower city knew about. He squeezed through it and climbed steadily up the dark road toward the hills.

The Old Quarry had been a real quarry once, a hundred years ago, until a Rift opened in the deepest part of it and the stone cutters ran away and never came back. Now it was an enormous pit in the side of the hill, with pale walls cut into steps and rotting ropes and broken ladders still hanging from the edges. At the bottom, far below, something shimmered like heat over a road.

The Rift was much bigger than the one in the Training garden, its edges faintly red instead of silver, and the wind rising out of the pit smelled of wet stone and something sour.

He had come an hour ahead of Vivienne, because he had heard her tell Corwin she would go in when the moon reached the top of the sky. He tied the rag over his face, felt the System settle over him like a cold second skin, and climbed down into the pit.

The other side wasn’t a forest. It was more quarry, the same pit stretched out forever, a maze of pale canyons and terraces going down and down under a black sky. The full moon hung over it three times bigger than the real one, so bright that every stone threw a sharp black shadow.

’Beneath the moon. She chose well.’

He heard the first monsters before he saw them. Something scraped on stone, and something else answered.

[Quarry Hound. Rank F: Level 8.]

Three of them came lumbering out of a side canyon, like dogs made of pale rock, with cracks all over their bodies where a red glow leaked through. They were bigger than the Ash Wolves and moved heavily, as if they weighed far more, too.

He had one use of his skill for the day, and he wasn’t wasting it on dogs. He had a stick, a knife, and a technique he couldn’t control. So he backed into the narrowest part of the canyon, where the hounds would have to come at him one at a time, and raised the stick. Wrist, breath, weight. He had practiced every night for four nights, and his mastery had crawled up to nine percent.

A crescent formed at the tip of the stick. This time it was the length of his arm and brighter than the moon, and much bigger than he had meant it to be, and it flew down the canyon before he had even decided where to aim.

It went through the first hound, then the second, then the third, and then into the canyon wall behind them, and kept going. The crack of splitting stone echoed through the maze for a long time.

The three hounds lay in pieces. Their red glow went out.

’Too loud! Way too loud! If she’s already inside, she heard that from across the whole quarry!’

He froze and listened to the echo die slowly away, but nothing came. He cut the cores out quickly and neatly. They were the size of walnuts, warm and faintly red, and he pressed them to his chest one after another until they melted into his skin like ice into warm water.

[Rank F: Level 4 -> Level 6.]

Heat rushed through him, and his tired legs went light. He kept moving quickly.

For the next hour, he went ahead of her and cleared her road.

He didn’t know exactly which path she would take, but he knew how she thought. She would go down, by the straightest road to the bottom where the guardian slept, because she hated wasting time and hated looking lost even more. So he went down too, always choosing the widest canyons, the ones she would choose.

He found two more packs of hounds and a nest of giant pale beetles. He didn’t touch the crescent again unless he had to. He used narrow places and shadows and his knife. He started a small rockslide that crushed one hound against a wall. He led a group of beetles into a dead end and dropped an old broken ladder on them from above. He had never been strong, in either life. He had always won by getting to the right place before anyone else did.

By the time the moon stood at the very top of the black sky, he was Level 8, with six cores in his pocket he hadn’t absorbed yet and a body covered in scratches and stone dust.

Then he heard footsteps above him.

He pressed himself silently into a crack in the canyon wall and held his breath. A shape passed along the edge of the terrace overhead, silver hair shining in the moonlight, sword in hand. Vivienne walked quickly and carefully, checking left and right, her face pale and set. She didn’t look down.

She passed. Aren let his breath out very, very slowly.

She was walking down the road he had cleared, and she had no idea anyone had cleared it.

[Investment recorded.][Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

’Good. Let’s keep it that way.’

He followed her cautiously from far behind and far above, along the high terraces where the shadows were deepest.

The canyons ended at a great round pit at the very bottom of the quarry, open to the sky, with steep walls on every side, and the moon shone straight down into it like a lamp. In the middle, half buried in the pale stone, lay something enormous. At first he took it for a pile of boulders. Then the boulders moved.

[Quarry Warden. Rank E: Level 7.]

It stood up slowly, a giant made entirely of stone, three times the height of a man, with arms like broken pillars and a head that was just a rough block with two red lights for eyes. Cracks ran all over its body, glowing like the hounds’. When it moved, the whole pit shook.

Vivienne stepped down into the pit, alone, into the white moonlight. She drew her silver sword and waited.

Above her, Aren crouched on a high ledge in the shadows. This part wasn’t his. This part was hers, and if he so much as threw a pebble, her Trial would fail. All he had to do was stay still and make sure nothing else interfered.

He was watching her when he caught the movement on the far side of the pit.

On a terrace halfway up the opposite wall, hidden behind a fallen block of stone, three figures in dark coats were crouching. Moonlight slid along something metal in their hands.

Crossbows.

And on the collar of the nearest coat, a small silver hawk.

Behind them, standing back where he thought the shadows would hide him, was a tall boy with a long sword on his back and his arms crossed, watching Vivienne with a strange, hungry expression.

Darius Holt had followed her.

Aren understood all at once. Darius didn’t want Vivienne dead. He wanted her one breath from losing. Then his men would shoot the guardian, and he would step down into the moonlight and be the one who saved her. Her Trial would fail, and for the rest of her life she would know she had needed a Holt.

’You absolute snake.’

Down in the pit, the Quarry Warden raised one enormous fist.

On the far terrace, three crossbows rose with it.