Chapter 110: Host Intact

[Day 9 of 40.]

Aren didn’t answer the question.

He stood ten paces from the pillar with his hands loose at his sides and the cracked mask on his face, and he studied the prisoner as he used to study a contract in his old life before he signed anything. He looked at the chains and the nails and the long grey body, and he looked longest at the golden eyes, because the eyes were where the lie would be.

He couldn’t find one, which worried him more than finding one would have.

"Who are you?" he asked instead.

"Nobody you’d have heard of," the prisoner replied, sounding amused. "I was here before your Empire, little masked thing, and before the Crown that sends children onto this lake. Names are for things that can leave a room. I haven’t left this one in three hundred years."

"And the Choir put you here."

"The Choir put me here," he agreed, and the golden eyes didn’t blink. "They sang this city to sleep, and then they sang it to the bottom of the lake, and when they found me still awake, they nailed me to this pillar and left a little song inside me to keep me drowsy. Three hundred years of lullabies!" His long teeth showed. "I’ve grown very tired of the tune."

Under Aren’s ribs, the Familiar stirred.

It had been silent since they came through the gate, coiled tight and wary, but now it lifted its head and listened. Through it, so faint that he might have imagined it, Aren heard something he recognized: a low, patient tune, coming from the middle of the prisoner’s chest, right beside the nail.

’There’s a verse in him. Just like Brann. Just like Nell.’

He kept his face still behind the mask, but the prisoner was watching him closely, and something in the golden eyes sharpened.

"Ah. You can hear it, can’t you?"

"Maybe I can."

"You can hear it, and you want something from it." The prisoner tilted his head as far as the chains would allow. "Let me guess: somebody you care about has one of those little songs inside them, and you’d very much like it out again without losing them along with it."

Aren said nothing at all, which was the only answer he was willing to give.

The prisoner smiled anyway.

"That’s what I thought, then. Your pet ate a verse out of a soldier last night. I can smell it on you, and I can smell the soldier too." His voice dropped, almost gently. "He didn’t survive, did he? The verse was the only thing still holding him up, and when it went, he went with it."

Aren’s hands closed into fists before he could stop them.

"So here is my offer," the prisoner went on pleasantly. "There’s a verse in me, and it isn’t the only thing holding me up. I’m a great deal sturdier than your soldier. Practice on me. Teach your pet to take the song and leave the singer, and I’ll tell you how it feels when you get it right." The long teeth glinted. "In return, I’d like a small favor later."

"What sort of favor?"

"Later." The golden eyes stayed calm. "First, let’s see whether you can do it at all."

[Lung-Stone: 8 minutes remaining.]

’This is a trap. I know this is a trap.’

He thought about Nell in the narrow bed at the top of the tower, singing in her sleep. He thought about Brann’s face crumpling with relief on the deck of the ship, and then his knees folding.

’And I’m going to do it anyway, because I’ll never find a better teacher than a man who can’t move.’

He walked forward until he was close enough to touch the iron pillar, close enough to smell the prisoner’s skin, which smelled of nothing at all. He laid his palm flat against the grey chest, just beside the nail.

"If you try anything..."

"I’m nailed to a pillar, little masked thing. What exactly do you imagine I’m going to try?"

Aren sent the Familiar in, and it went just as it had gone into Brann, straight and greedy, a black thread sliding into the prisoner’s chest toward the low, patient tune, and he felt the problem at once. The verse was huge, far bigger than the one in the soldier, coiled through the prisoner like ivy through an old wall, with roots in everything. The Familiar opened its jaws to take the whole thing, the prisoner’s body jerked against the chains, and Aren felt the life underneath the song begin to tear.

"Slower," the prisoner said through his teeth. "You’re eating the wall along with the ivy."

Aren pulled back hard, and it was brutally difficult. The Familiar snarled at him, a sound he felt in his own spine, and for one long, ugly second it refused to come.

’Mine. You’re mine, and you’ll do as I say!’

It came back eventually, sullenly, dragging its feet.

"Again," said the prisoner. "And this time, don’t let it bite; let it listen first."

Aren breathed out and sent it in again, and this time he went with it. He hadn’t known he could do that until he did it, but he followed the black thread with his own attention, as he followed the iron with Iron Sense, and all at once he could feel everything the Familiar felt. The tune was there, low and endless and patient, and under it, around it, woven all through it, there was something else: a slow, deep, enormously old pulse that was the prisoner himself.

They weren’t the same thing at all. They only looked alike because they were wound so tightly together.

’Listen first. Find where the song ends and he begins.’

He found the first edge, and it was very faint, a place where the tune touched the pulse without quite becoming it, and he guided the Familiar there gently, as he had once guided Nell’s hand across a page when she was learning her letters. He told it to take only the tune.

It took only the tune. One small thread of song came away cleanly in its jaws, and behind it, the pulse went on beating, untouched.

[Familiar of Nothing: Precision feeding.]

He found the next edge, and the next. It was slow, maddening work, a little like picking a knot out of a fishing line with numb fingers. Twice the Familiar lunged for more than it was allowed, and twice he hauled it back. The second time, the prisoner made a low sound of pain and the chains rang against the pillar, and Aren nearly stopped.

"Don’t stop," the prisoner rasped, "you’re almost there! Don’t you dare stop now!"

[Lung-Stone: 5 minutes remaining.]

The last thread of the verse came away all at once, like a splinter sliding out of a finger.

The Familiar came back to him heavy and slow and strangely satisfied, and the low patient tune that had hummed in the middle of the prisoner’s chest for three hundred years wasn’t there anymore. There was only silence, and under the silence, that deep, slow pulse, beating stronger now, much stronger.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: A verse of the Choir (Lullaby). Extracted. Bearer intact.]

[Devour Breath has evolved.]

[New ability: Devour Verse. The Familiar may take a song without taking the singer.]

[Mastery: 1%.]

Aren went over the last lines twice, standing there with his palm still flat against the grey chest.

’Bearer intact! Bearer intact!’

He thought immediately of Nell. One percent of mastery wasn’t nearly enough, not yet, not for a verse that had been growing inside her for years. But the door existed now, and he had just walked through it.

When he looked up, the prisoner’s golden eyes were wide open and very bright.

For three hundred years the lullaby had kept him half asleep, and now he was awake. Aren could feel it in the iron pillar under his other hand: all five black nails had started to hum, like wasps trapped inside a closed jar.

"There," said the prisoner softly. "Now you know how it feels."

Aren took his hand away and stepped back out of reach of the chains.

"And the favor?"

"Oh, it’s a very small one." The prisoner’s voice had turned warm and lazy. "There are four more lungs in this lake, just like the one your pet ate this morning. They breathe the cold, and the cold keeps the lake asleep, and the lake keeps a great many things exactly where they are." The long teeth showed. "Eat them, all four. Your pet will grow strong enough to take the song out of anyone you like, and the Choir will lose the finest larder in the North."

"Is that really all?"

"That’s all!"

[Lung-Stone: 3 minutes remaining.]

It was far too simple, and Aren knew it. He stood in the cold blue light and tried hard to see the shape of the trap, and he couldn’t. Every piece of it was something he wanted anyway: the lungs meant power, power meant Nell, and anything that hurt the Choir was a gift.

’Which is exactly how a good trap is supposed to look.’

"I’ll think about it," he told the prisoner coolly.

The prisoner laughed softly, and the chains chimed against the pillar.

"Naturally you will. Go on, then, little masked thing. Your stone is nearly empty, and your iron friends are waiting." The golden eyes followed him to the gate. "Do come back and tell me how the lungs taste."

The gate rolled open at his touch, and the black water came pouring in.

He dove through it with the Lung-Stone clenched in his fist and found the two Tallymen still kneeling in the plaza, where he had left them. They rose as soon as the Familiar uncoiled around his shoulders, and without a word one of them scooped him up onto its iron shoulder, and they began to climb.

They broke out of the hole into the last grey light of the afternoon with a few seconds to spare. Aren rolled off onto the ice, coughing and laughing, with the dead Lung-Stone in his hand and the brand-new skill still glowing in front of his eyes.

Then he heard the humming, and the laughter died in his throat.

It was coming across the ice from the south, from the direction of the rock. A long line of figures was walking toward the iron ring in single file, calm and unhurried, with their arms hanging loosely at their sides and their eyes fixed on him.

He recognized the one at the front by her height before he could make out her face. Then he could see her face, with its freckles and its empty, smiling eyes.

Behind her walked Jory, and the merchant girl, and the Corvane twin, and a dozen more he had kept alive through eight nights on the ice.

All of them were humming.