Chapter 111: Gentle Hands

[Day 9 of 40. Dusk.]

He counted them as they came, because he couldn’t help it.

Freckles, Jory, the merchant girl and the Corvane twin came first, then both Merrow girls and the lesser-house boy they had pulled off the ship, then three of Kaela’s soldiers, still in their scale coats, and six more candidates he had stood beside in the rings and told terrible jokes to until dawn. Sixteen people in all, walking across the ice in a long, neat line with their arms hanging loosely at their sides, all of them humming the same low, patient tune.

’Sixteen of them! I left them on the rock last night, and the Choir walked them straight out to me.’

Under his ribs, the Familiar lifted its head and purred.

It could hear the verses, and he could feel it hearing them, sixteen small, sweet songs coming toward it across the ice like plates of food carried in on a tray, and it was already uncoiling, already stretching out toward them with all the lazy confidence of something that had eaten a lung for breakfast.

’No, absolutely not!’

He hauled on the leash so hard that he felt it in his own teeth.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 1%.]

One percent was nothing. He had taken a single song out of a man who was half a mountain and three hundred years old, and he had nearly torn him in half doing it. Freckles was fifteen and small for her age. If the Familiar went into her now, it wouldn’t take the song. It would take everything the song was wrapped around, as it had with Brann.

The line stopped twenty paces away.

Freckles stood at the front with her hands at her sides and smiled at him sweetly with those empty eyes, and when she spoke, it was in the warm grey voice of a priest.

"Good evening, little eater. What a busy day you’ve had!"

"Ansel." Aren kept his voice level. "You’re a long way from your mountain."

"I’m wherever my verses are. You should know that by now." Freckles tilted her head, and all fifteen people behind her tilted their heads at the same angle. "I hear you’ve learned a new trick. Go on, then. Take it out of her. You know how now, don’t you?"

Aren didn’t move a muscle, and he didn’t answer.

"No?" The smile widened. "Then I’ll make this simple for you. These sixteen are mine until you give me back what your pet stole from my brother on the ship. Until then, they’ll keep walking toward you, every night, wherever you go. And every night, a few more of them will join the soldiers under the ice."

The humming changed pitch, and all sixteen of them stepped forward together.

"Unless you’d rather eat them first," said Ansel kindly. "I’ll leave that up to you."

Then the merchant girl lifted her hand, and her lips moved, and a voice that wasn’t hers said the name of her skill aloud.

"Frost Needle."

[Frost Needle (Rank E).]

A splinter of ice came off her palm, straight at his eye. He tipped his head a finger’s width to the side, and it went past and shattered against the iron shoulder of the Tallyman behind him.

’They’re even announcing their skills. The Choir has exactly the same manners as Haskel!’

Then all of them came at once.

It should have been easy, because every one of them was Rank E or F, except the three soldiers, and even the soldiers were barely Skin Tempered. He had four hundred and thirteen points of strength, and he had cut eight trained men apart on the ice last night without breaking a sweat.

That was exactly the problem, and he knew it before the first of them reached him.

The Corvane twin reached him first, swinging a short sword in a wide, clumsy arc. Street Fighter’s Instinct showed him a dozen ways to end it in a heartbeat, and every one of them ended with the boy’s neck broken. Aren slipped inside the swing instead, caught the twin’s wrist as if it were made of eggshell, and turned it until the sword fell. Then he set two fingers against the side of the boy’s throat and pressed, counting.

’One, two, three, gently. Gently, you idiot, you’re a lot stronger than you think.’

The twin’s eyes rolled up into his head, and Aren caught him as he folded and laid him down on the ice.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct: Restraint. Mastery: 81% → 82%.]

"Hold them," he told the Tallymen. "Don’t break them. If you break one of them, I’ll melt you down for horseshoes!"

The two iron constructs looked at him with their blank round faces. Then they stepped forward, and he discovered that something built to crush a horse’s skull could also lift a struggling fifteen-year-old off the ice as delicately as a man lifting a sleeping baby. One of them took the lesser-house boy around the waist and held him up in the air, kicking and humming, while the other pinned two soldiers flat against the ice under one broad iron hand.

’Good iron, very good iron!’

Jory came at him from behind.

"Stone Skin," said Jory’s mouth, in that warm grey voice.

[Stone Skin (Rank E).]

Grey crept over the boy’s face and arms, and he threw himself at the fool’s back with his whole weight. Aren let him land, and it was like being hugged by a statue. Jory’s arms locked tight around his chest, and the boy began to squeeze, and somewhere in the middle of the humming, Aren heard him crying.

He was crying, the real thing. The song was walking him around, but somewhere underneath it, Jory was still there, and Jory knew what his arms were doing.

’Hang on, Jory. I’m coming to get you out, I promise.’

Aren reached back, found the boy’s elbows, and pried them open one finger at a time, with as much strength as it took and not a single point more. It was much harder than catching a Tallyman’s rod. Then he turned, swept Jory’s feet out from under him, and lowered him to the ice on his back.

The Familiar lunged the instant he let his guard slip.

It went for Jory’s song the moment the boy hit the ice, a black thread darting out of Aren’s chest before he could stop it, and he felt it touch the verse. It was tiny compared to the prisoner’s, a little coil of tune tucked behind the boy’s heart, but it was rooted in everything. Its roots went into his breath and his heartbeat and the small, frightened warmth that was Jory, and the Familiar opened its jaws.

"Mine!" Aren roared, out loud, and he wrenched it back with everything he had.

It came back snarling furiously, and Jory lay on the ice gasping, his stone skin cracking off his face in grey flakes, and stared up at the fool with eyes that, for a single heartbeat, were his own.

Then the humming closed over them again.

Aren crouched there with his hand on the boy’s chest, breathing hard. His own heart was hammering much faster than it had during the whole fight on the ship.

’That’s the real enemy tonight. It isn’t sixteen kids with Rank E skills, it’s my own pet!’

He finished it quickly after that, because every second he spent fighting them was a second the Familiar spent straining at the leash. He took the Merrow girls together, one hand on each throat, and counted to three. He let the merchant girl throw every Frost Needle she had until her hands were blue, and then he walked through the last of them and picked her up. The three soldiers were the hardest, trained men with real reflexes, and one of them got a dagger into his side before he could put him down. Perfect Blood had started closing the wound before the man even hit the ice.

[Perfect Blood. Wound: healing.]

Freckles was the last, and she hadn’t moved at all. She stood where she had stopped, with her hands at her sides, smiling, and when he walked up to her, she didn’t try to hit him. She just looked up at him with Ansel behind her eyes.

"You won’t," said the priest’s voice, gently. "You can’t. That’s the lovely thing about you, little eater. You care."

Aren knelt down in front of her on the ice.

He laid his palm flat against her chest, very lightly, and listened, just as the prisoner had taught him. The verse was there, low and patient, curled behind her heart like a cat on a windowsill. He could feel where it touched her. He could feel the faint, uncertain edges where the song ended and Freckles began.

There were too many of them, far too many, and they were far too faint. At one percent, he couldn’t have found even half of them.

He took his hand away and sat back on his heels.

"Not yet," he told her. "But soon. I’m coming back for you, Ansel. And when I do, you’ll hear me coming."

The priest laughed softly through her mouth. Aren pressed two fingers against the side of her throat and counted to three, and the laugh stopped, and Freckles slumped forward into his arms.

[Day 9 of 40. Night.]

They carried them back across the ice in the dark.

It took most of the night. The two Tallymen walked in front, one with six sleeping bodies and the other with seven, cradled carefully in their long iron arms, and Aren came behind with Freckles on his back and Jory over one shoulder and the Corvane twin over the other. All around them, ten thousand frozen soldiers turned slowly in the ice to watch them pass.

The sixteen didn’t stay asleep for long. One by one they woke, and one by one they started humming again, and struggling, but the Tallymen didn’t loosen their grip, and Aren didn’t let go.

He fed the Familiar the cold around them as they walked, small bites, always small bites, just enough to keep them all alive. Every single bite, it tried to go further, and every single time, he pulled it back.

The ship came up out of the dark a little before dawn.

He took them down into the hold, where they had all slept shoulder to shoulder on the second night, and the Tallymen laid them down on the tilted planks in a row. Iron bands ran around the inside of the hull, old and black and thick as his wrist, and Iron Sense told him they were sound. The hatch above was banded iron too.

"Stay here," he told the Tallymen. "Nobody goes in and nobody comes out. If they sing to you, don’t listen."

The two constructs took up their places on either side of the hatch, with their iron rods across their chests. He had no idea whether they could hear a song at all. He hoped very much that they couldn’t.

When he climbed back out onto the deck, Sigrid was standing at the top of the gangway.

She must have seen them coming across the ice from the rock and walked over alone in the dark. She looked at the hatch, and at the Tallymen standing beside it, and then at him, and her face didn’t change at all.

"How many?"

"Sixteen. All alive."

She let out a long, slow breath that steamed in the air.

"And you want somebody to feed them."

"Twice a day, through the hatch. Wax in your ears. Don’t talk to them, and don’t let them talk to you, no matter whose voice they use." He paused. "Especially if they use mine."

Sigrid studied him silently in the grey half-light. Behind her, three hundred paces away, he could see a single tall figure standing at the very edge of the rock with a lance in her hand, watching. Kaela didn’t come down; she stood there, motionless, and watched him.

"And you?" Sigrid asked finally.

"I’ve got four more errands on this lake." He settled his cap until the bell hung straight. "When I’ve finished them, I’ll be able to bring all sixteen of them back. Every single one."

"You’re very sure of that."

"I’m a fool. Fools are always sure."

He turned to go, but then the sun touched the peaks in the east, and he stopped on the gangway, because he knew what came at dawn.

The count rose up through the ice, through the hull of the ship, and into the soles of his boots.

Seventeen.

"Seventeen," Aren answered. "Naught. I’m here."

On the rock, faintly, he heard the others answer, one voice after another, Ivo and Kaela and her soldiers.

Then, from the hold beneath his feet, sixteen voices answered all at once, in perfect unison.

It wasn’t their own voices at all. It was one voice, warm and grey and patient, speaking through sixteen mouths at the same time.

"We’re here."

And under the ice, somewhere very far away toward the center of the lake, one of the five black nails began to hum a little louder.