Chapter 112: The Barracks

[Day 11 of 40.]

It took him a full day to find the second lung.

The Familiar could smell it faintly, but the scent was everywhere and nowhere at once. It came up through the cracks that breathed. It drifted on the wind across the open ice. Twice he followed it for hours toward the north shore, and twice it faded out in front of him, and he had to trudge back to the ship in the dark with nothing to show for it.

Every dawn he stood on the gangway for the count, and every dawn sixteen voices answered from the hold beneath his feet in a single warm, grey voice that wasn’t theirs.

On the morning of the tenth day, there were only fifteen.

Sigrid met him at the top of the gangway with her face set hard. One of Kaela’s soldiers, the one who had put a dagger in his side, had stopped breathing in the night. There hadn’t been a mark on him. He had been lying on the planks with the others, humming, and then he wasn’t humming anymore, and by the time Sigrid came down with the morning bread, the ice had already come up through the bottom of the hull and taken him.

"He told you," Sigrid said quietly. "The priest told you this would happen. A few more every night!"

"I know what he told me."

"Then go and find your errand faster, fool."

He didn’t answer her, and he stood on the deck with his hands clenched inside his sleeves and listened to the fifteen voices humming below, and he felt the Familiar listening with him, hungry and patient, and he wanted to hit something so badly that his teeth ached, worse than he had since the Abyss.

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 0/2.]

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 1%.]

On the eleventh day, the wind changed, and the scent came clearly at last.

It came from the place that the old accounts in Ivo’s margin called the Barracks. Ivo had marked it with a single careful line in the margin, and below it, in smaller letters, two words: Do not.

Aren went anyway.

The Barracks lay two hours east of the iron ring, and he knew he had reached it long before he saw anything, because the frozen soldiers changed. Everywhere else on the lake they stood scattered, alone or in small, broken groups, caught in the middle of running. Here they stood in straight ranks.

There were a thousand of them, perhaps more, frozen in perfect square blocks of a hundred men each, shoulder to shoulder, with their shields locked and their spears held upright at the same angle. They wore armor he didn’t recognize, older than anything in the Empire, scale and bronze and tall crested helmets, and they weren’t running from anything. They were standing proudly at attention, as if waiting for an inspection that had never come.

In the middle of them all, on a low mound of ice, stood a single tall figure with a long cloak frozen stiff behind him and a sword resting point-down in front of his boots. His hands were folded on the pommel, and his face, behind the bronze cheek-plates of his helmet, was turned toward the fool.

The scent was coming straight out of his chest.

’Naturally it’s the general. It’s always the general!’

Aren stopped at the edge of the first block, a pace from the nearest frozen shield.

The ice under his feet breathed in.

It was the same long, deep pull he had felt on the first night, the breath of the Hollow, but this time it came from in front of him, and when it finished, every single soldier in the Barracks opened his eyes.

The ice split with a deafening crack!

They came out of it all together, in perfect step, frost streaming off their bronze, and the blocks turned smoothly to face him, a hundred spears dropping level in the same instant, and the next hundred, and the next. It was the most beautiful drill he had ever seen. It was a single animal made of men.

On the mound, the general lifted his sword.

"Deserter," he said.

His voice was the creak of a frozen river. It didn’t carry, and it didn’t need to. Every soldier in the Barracks heard it, and every soldier in the Barracks took one step forward.

"I’ve never served a day in my life," Aren told him. "I’m a fool. Look, I’ve got a bell!"

The general studied the bell gravely with his empty, frosted eyes, as if it were an insult he couldn’t quite place.

"Deserter," he repeated, and pointed his sword.

The first block came at Aren at a run.

He let the Familiar off the leash.

He had been holding it back for three days, from sixteen songs it badly wanted to eat, and it went out of him now joyfully, off the chain at last. It didn’t even bother to be quick. It went into the front rank of the running block playfully, a black ribbon looping in and out between the bronze shields, and wherever it passed, a soldier stopped. The breath that had walked him for three hundred years went out of him in a puff of mist, and he fell where he stood, with his spear still level, and shattered on the ice.

Ten of them went down in the time it took Aren to blink. Then twenty, then forty. The Familiar was purring so hard that he could feel it in his own teeth.

’Go on, then, enjoy yourself! You’ve earned it.’

The block didn’t break, and that was the truly eerie part. Men toppled and shattered on every side, and the ranks closed up over the gaps and kept on coming, in perfect step, until the last row of the first hundred reached him and he had to step aside to let their spears go by.

The second block was already moving, and the third, and the fourth.

’All right, that’s enough playing!’

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

[New Moon.]

[Essence: 100% → 82%.]

The crescent went out flat and low across the ice, as long as a cart, black as a hole in the world, and it went through the second block from front to back. It didn’t stop at the bronze. It didn’t stop at the frozen flesh underneath, or the ice beneath their boots, or the third block behind them. It went on and on until it struck the mound in the middle of the Barracks, and carved a long, smoking groove across the ice at the general’s feet.

Two hundred soldiers came apart in a single long hiss of breaking frost.

The general looked down at the groove in front of his boots, and then back up at the little masked figure standing alone in the field, and very slightly, his frozen face changed.

It wasn’t fear. Whatever had been left of fear in him had frozen solid three hundred years ago. It was a flicker of cold, professional interest, a sergeant noticing that a new recruit could hold a spear.

"Deserter," he said again, more quietly, and this time it almost sounded like a compliment.

’Thanks, I suppose. I’m still not joining.’

There were still seven hundred of them. They were turning in toward him from every side now, block after block, the whole Barracks wheeling around him to close him in, and every one of them was bound to the general on the mound by the same cold breath. He could feel it with the Familiar, now that it was out among them. A thousand fine threads ran from the general’s chest to every soldier in the field, as tight as harp strings.

He laid his palm flat against the ice and reached for them.

’Reduce it.’

[Reduce to Zero: The general’s command. Uses today: 1/2.]

The threads went slack, all of them at once, for one second.

Seven hundred soldiers stopped in mid-stride. Their spears drooped and their shields sagged heavily. Then, as if somebody had cut the strings of a whole theatre of puppets, they folded down onto the ice where they stood, rank after rank, block after block, with a long, rolling clatter of bronze that echoed off the mountains for a full minute after the last of them lay still.

Then the Barracks was silent, and only the general was left standing.

He came down off the mound alone. He moved stiff-legged, with three hundred years of ice in his knees, and he held his sword in both hands, and his frozen eyes never left the fool. When he was ten paces away, he raised the blade over his head.

Aren walked up to him and hit him once in the chest.

The bronze breastplate caved in. Behind it, the frozen body cracked from collarbone to belt, and the general went backward onto the ice with his sword still raised, and lay there with a hole in his chest, and inside it, glowing blue, the lung.

"Dessert," Aren told the Familiar, and it went in.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: The Hollow’s second lung.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 63% → 75%.]

Then a new window opened, one he hadn’t expected at all.

[The lung was wrapped in a verse of the Choir.]

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 1% → 12%.]

He went over it again, standing there among a thousand broken soldiers with the wind tugging at his cap.

’Twelve! From one to twelve, from a single lung. The Choir wrapped every one of these things in a song, just like the prisoner said, to keep the lake asleep. Every lung I eat teaches me how to take a song apart.’

Three more lungs, and he would be able to walk down into that hold and give fifteen people their own voices back.

He turned to go, and his boot struck something that wasn’t bronze.

It was lying a little apart from the ranks, half buried in the ice at the foot of the mound, and it was newer than everything else in the Barracks by three hundred years. It was a man in a grey wool coat with brass buttons, and on his shoulder was a badge Aren recognized at once, because he had seen it on the wagons that brought them north.

The crowned tower of the Imperial Crown.

The man had been dead for years, eight or nine at most. One of his hands was still pressed flat against the breast of his coat, as if he had been holding something there when the cold took him. Aren knelt, broke the ice around the frozen fingers as gently as he could, and drew out a folded letter wrapped in oiled silk.

The seal was still intact, and it was the Crown’s. He broke it with his thumb.

There were only a few lines, written in a neat, official hand.

To the warden of the Hollow trial. Forty days, as before. Let it feed. Do not intervene. Bring home whoever is left standing, and record their names as heroes of the North.

Aren read it three times. Then he folded it and put it inside his shirt, beside Ivo’s map.

’Let it feed. So that’s what we really are. We aren’t candidates at all, we’re supper!’

Far below him, under the ice and the drowned city and the iron gate with the empty circle, in a cavern lit by the faint blue glow of dead lungs, something slid a finger’s breadth out of a black iron pillar with a long, thin scrape.

The prisoner opened his golden eyes and smiled at the dark.

"Three," he said.